---
title: 'Research Engineer at Nace AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-nace-ai-palo-alto-e7tmvqk7x4qq'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-15'
---

# Research Engineer at Nace AI

- **Company:** Nace AI
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-03-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nace.ai/6725bbfa-6a80-43b7-bce2-5df2d0c20604

## Job description

About Us: At Nace AI, we are redefining how professional services operate by delivering Sovereign Specialized Intelligence. As an applied research and product company, we equip enterprises with a comprehensive AI stack to build customized, secure intelligence tailored to their unique business needs. Driven by advanced Small Language Models and our dynamic metamodel framework, our flagship platforms - Nace Data Intelligence and the Nace SLM Cloud - enable true end-to-end business process automation. The result is transformative ROI: professional services firms using Nace AI are currently recovering 1,000 hours per client engagement, drastically reducing overhead and accelerating delivery. The work we are doing has a meaningful impact across industries, and every hire at Nace AI plays a critical role in shaping the company’s trajectory. This is a unique opportunity to join a high conviction AI company at an early stage and directly influence its growth.

If building a world-class AI team from the ground up excites you, we’d love to talk.

## About the Role

We're looking for a Research Scientist to advance the core methods behind Nace AI's Small Language Models and metamodel framework. You'll work at the intersection of research and production, designing novel approaches to LLM adaptation, meta-learning, and hypernetworks, then carrying them from experimentation into systems that power Nace Data Intelligence and the Nace SLM Cloud. This is a hands-on role on a small, high-caliber team. You'll own research problems end to end: framing the question, running rigorous experiments, publishing or open-sourcing where it makes sense, and partnering closely with engineering to ship what works. Your work will directly shape how enterprises build customized, secure intelligence on our stack.

## Minimum Qualifications

- 3+ years of combined research and engineering experience in machine learning, including hands-on work with language models.Direct experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs) or Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in research or production settings
- Strong research background in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, or related disciplines with focus on language modeling
- Proven track record in solving complex problems in language understanding, generation, or multimodal AI using rigorous quantitative methodologies
- Demonstrated ability to clearly communicate research findings to diverse technical audiences
- Proficient programming skills in Python and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow), with experience in distributed training and model optimization

## Preferred Qualifications

- 5+ years of experience conducting applied ML research, with a sustained record of taking novel methods from experimentation to working systems.
- PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, or closely related field with focus on language models and adaptive learning systems
- Proven research and engineering experience with LLMs/VLMs, particularly in meta-learning or parameter-efficient adaptation, as evidenced by grants, fellowships, patents, internships, or contributions to open-source projects
- First authored publications on language models, meta-learning, hypernetworks, or adaptive AI in recognized peer-reviewed conferences (ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) or journals
- Kaggle experience is a plus.

## Preferred Technical Experience

- Research expertise in LLM reasoning, hypernetworks, multi-task learning, meta-learning, designing novel LLM adaptation methods, Online Continual Learning

## About Nace AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Nace AI builds long-horizon reasoning models and AI agents that audit, reconcile, and report on financial and compliance data for enterprises.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed / Series A – $21.5M raised in 2026)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Zhanibek Datbayev (CTO/Co-Founder), Ritesh Shrivastava (Co-Founder), Sudha Valluru (COO/Co-Founder), Swathi B (Co-Founder), and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Audit, Compliance, Finance, Accounting, Enterprise AI
- **Target customers**: B2B enterprise – specifically audit firms, finance departments, compliance teams, and professional services firms
- **Mission**: Build long-horizon AI that runs organizations; give professionals their time back by automating high-stakes knowledge work

## Products & Services
- **Metamodel**: A specialized small language model (SLM) platform that enterprises can customize with their own policies and knowledge. Used for audit, contract governance, and financial reporting.
- **Agentic Accounting**: AI agent that executes end-to-end financial audits, billing audits, and revenue leakage detection by connecting directly to databases.
- **Nace Verification Intelligence**: Evidence-based reasoning engine that processes up to 1 million files (PDFs, spreadsheets, databases) to automate SOX 404 reports, contract compliance checks, and due diligence.
- **Nace Process Automation**: Automatically maps transaction flows across 10+ disparate databases to visualize and reconcile processes.
- **The Macros**: A research preview product that lets power users create custom AI macros for repetitive professional tasks.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $21.5M (May 2026 round led by Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, AME Cloud Ventures, AICONIC VENTURES); earlier $5M seed round (April 2025) led by General Catalyst.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: General Catalyst, Walden Catalyst Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, AICONIC VENTURES
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Launched from stealth in March 2025 with Metamodel 1
  - Raised $21.5M within 14 months of founding
  - Operations in 7 countries (US, Kazakhstan, India, Canada, Germany, Ukraine, Georgia)
  - 2,574 LinkedIn followers (+141% YoY)
  - Active job postings for senior roles (Product Manager, Audit Consultant, Growth Lead)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Metamodel approach**: Enterprises can turn internal policies and employee knowledge into custom, on‑premise AI models, enforcing consistency and accuracy.
- **Evidence‑based reasoning**: The system explains exactly where it looked and why – building trust in regulated environments (SOC 2 Type II, AICPA audited infrastructure).
- **Small model efficiency**: Uses specialized small language models (SLMs) instead of massive general LLMs, making deployments faster, cheaper, and compliant with data sovereignty requirements.
- **End‑to‑end automation**: Covers the entire audit workflow – from raw database ingestion to boardroom‑ready reports – without any manual spreadsheet work.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale the Metamodel platform**: Turn enterprise policies into custom AI agents for every department.
- **Expand into adjacent compliance verticals** (tax, due diligence, contract governance).
- **Grow the team** across engineering, product, and go‑to‑market roles (currently 39–50 employees, with a heavy technical tilt of ~45%).
- **Maintain on‑premises / hybrid cloud deployments** to meet strict regulatory requirements of audit and finance clients.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Fast‑paced research‑first environment assembling a “world‑class team” to solve high‑stakes scaling challenges in AI reasoning.
- **Work model**: Hybrid workspace (Palo Alto offices); many roles are in‑office for close collaboration on complex ML and product work.
- **Team composition**: Heavy technical concentration (45% of staff are engineers/researchers), with deep domain expertise from ex‑Dropbox, Bloomberg, McKinsey, and AI labs.
- **Impact**: Build infrastructure that gives audit, compliance, and finance professionals their time back – directly reduces manual drudgery in multi‑billion‑dollar compliance markets.
- **Perks**: Not explicitly detailed, but the company emphasizes “autonomy, impact, and working on the hardest AI problems in enterprise.”

## Sources
1. [nace.ai](https://nace.ai/)
2. [nace.ai/careers](https://nace.ai/careers)
3. [LinkedIn – Nace AI](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nace-ai)
4. [Built In – Nace.AI](https://builtin.com/company/nace-ai)
5. [Jobs.ashbyhq.com – Nace AI](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nace.ai)

## Other roles at Nace AI

- [VP of Sales](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-sales-nace-ai-palo-alto-fkcz0mvxe9tz) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-nace-ai-palo-alto-k0apcdfwy4pp) — Palo Alto, CA
- [VP of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-engineering-nace-ai-palo-alto-q8d26ckgppqq) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Technical Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-nace-ai-palo-alto-8py4nbage3rw) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Senior MLOps Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-mlops-engineer-nace-ai-palo-alto-x8adzytpzn63) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Senior Product Designer (AI & Prototyping)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-designer-ai-prototyping-nace-ai-palo-alto-g533v3r04kqy) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Financial Audit Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/financial-audit-consultant-nace-ai-palo-alto-xd0vjpcf326t) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Senior Technical Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-technical-recruiter-nace-ai-palo-alto-w9tkfpeqqv2f) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Growth Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketing-lead-nace-ai-palo-alto-7bw1bwfdqydv) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Valuation Due Diligence Expert](https://feeny.ai/job/valuation-due-diligence-expert-nace-ai-palo-alto-c51g3m2xy7q0) — Palo Alto, CA