# VP Research (Foundation Models)

> Visium SA · Zürich, Switzerland · Full-time · Posted 2026-06-11

**Workplace:** on_site

**Department:** AI

## Description

Visium combines strategy, frontier AI, and deep regulated-industry expertise to build and deploy AI-native systems that reinvent how businesses operate - unlocking the value of AI at scale.

We're not a strategy firm that ships slide decks and walks away. Not a tech consultancy that builds what won't get adopted. Not a product company chasing problems it doesn't understand. We're all three at once: strategy, deep technical and integration expertise, and product, working as one. That combination is our flywheel. Consulting keeps us close to the hardest real-world problems. Products let us solve them at scale. Every engagement sharpens our products; every deployment makes the next engagement faster, deeper, and more certain.

We're obsessed with outcomes. While 95% of enterprise AI pilots never reach production, Visium is built to be the 5% delivering productised AI that compounds in value, not point solutions that deliver marginal gains. We are AI-native, not AI-adjacent. We don't bolt AI onto broken workflows; we redesign them with AI at the core.

**Role**

As a VP of Research - Foundation Models (Distinguished Scientist / Research Lead), you will own:

-   Pre-training strategy and execution for biologics foundation models built from scratch across modalities (architecture, data, representation, scaling, evaluation).
-   Continued pre-training and adaptation of vertical LLMs for regulated industries.
-   The full training stack in practice: data pipelines, distributed training, scaling laws, evaluation harnesses, checkpointing, failure recovery.
-   Research direction, standards and review for a small founding team.
-   Translating frontier research into models that hold up in regulated, real-world use.

You’ll be a hands-on Research Lead / Distinguished Scientist role - not a manager of managers - owning architectures, training runs, and technical direction alongside a founding team of elite researchers. Freedom to publish, established compute resources, and direct collaboration with founders, offering real ownership and zero bureaucracy from day one.

## Requirements

To succeed in this role, you bring a combination of expertise, experience, and skills including:

-   World-class pre-training experience (Meta / FAIR, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Mistral, or equivalent/academic).
-   Deep mastery of large-scale distributed training (parallelism strategies, scaling laws, optimization at scale, debugging instability).
-   Demonstrated experience in data acquisition and preparation at scale.
-   Strong publication or shipped-model track record.
-   Biologics / scientific foundation model pre-training experience across modalities (e.g. protein, genomic, molecular, structural, multi-omics, or other specialized scientific domains). 
-   PhD in a relevant field.
-   Ability to code and stay hands-on in the details.
-   Willingness to be based in Switzerland (Lausanne or Zurich), on-site.

## Benefits

By joining us as VP of Research, you'll benefit from

-   Defined, in-place compute to run real pre-training.
-   A founding research seat with genuine technical authority.
-   Direct partnership with top-20 pharma companies to bring world-leading models to life.
-   Direct line to the founding team and co-shaping the company strategy
-   Ability to publish and open source research
-   A competitive compensation package incl. Equity
-   A flexible working culture of freedom & responsibility
-   A position that enables you to have an impact on 1’000s of people and the future of the company
-   An international, passionate team of demonstrated extraordinary achievements with a strong collaborative mindset and a drive to make a positive difference

## Apply

[Apply at Visium SA](https://apply.workable.com/visium/j/F19132C85F/apply)

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