Head of Research & Development (R&D)

Job description

Head of Research & Development (R&D) **Location:** Global (Remote) **Reports to:** CEO **Employment Type:** Full-time ## **Mission at Rwazi** Rwazi’s long-term advantage depends on expanding the frontier of what decision systems can reason about. The Head of R&D owns long-horizon capability development — exploring, prototyping, and formalizing the next generation of decision intelligence that will power future versions of Rwazi’s platform. This role operates beyond immediate roadmap pressures. It identifies structural opportunities in reasoning systems, signal modeling, AI-assisted judgment, and decision automation — and transforms them into foundational capabilities. The Head of R&D defines what Rwazi becomes 3–5 years from now. ## **Core Mandate** The Head of R&D is accountable for: - Advancing future decision system architectures - Formalizing higher-order reasoning capabilities - Exploring new signal classes and evaluation logic - Identifying structural AI leverage points - Converting research into reusable system primitives This is a capability-building role, not a feature-delivery function. ## **Key Responsibilities** ### **Long-Horizon Capability Exploration** - Identify unsolved reasoning challenges within Rwazi’s domain - Explore advanced decision frameworks beyond current product constraints - Develop conceptual models for higher-order AI reasoning systems - Investigate new signal environments and structured judgment methods ### **Prototype & Formalization** - Build experimental prototypes to test new system architectures - Formalize reasoning patterns into structured logic frameworks - Create reusable primitives that Product and Engineering can adopt - Document system logic in technically rigorous formats ### **AI & Decision Systems Advancement** - Push beyond current signal-to-output pipelines - Explore multi-layer reasoning and tradeoff modeling - Design evaluation criteria for increasingly complex decisions - Anticipate future enterprise use cases and model their structural requirements ### **Strategic Interface with Executive Leadership** - Advise CEO on long-term technical differentiation strategy - Translate research insights into strategic investment decisions - Identify potential defensibility moats ### **Research Governance** - Define standards for experimentation rigor - Establish evaluation frameworks for prototype validation - Maintain clarity between exploratory work and production systems ## **Role Impact** Strong performance in this role results in: - Structural differentiation in decision intelligence - New classes of solvable enterprise questions - Expansion of AI-assisted reasoning depth - Long-term defensibility against competitors - Research-driven product evolution This role ensures Rwazi does not stagnate at feature-level innovation. ## **What This Role Is Not** - This is not roadmap feature delivery - This is not short-term optimization - This is not pure academic research detached from application - This is not reactive problem-solving This role requires frontier thinking and disciplined formalization. ## **Qualifications and Profile** We are looking for individuals who demonstrate: - Deep systems thinking and formal reasoning ability - Experience designing structured decision frameworks - Strong understanding of AI systems, modeling logic, or computational reasoning - Ability to translate abstract research into usable system components - Comfort operating autonomously at high strategic altitude - Demonstrated work on complex, ambiguous problems Candidates may come from applied research, AI system design, computational modeling, advanced analytics, or technically rigorous environments. ## **Cultural Fit** We value leaders who: - Think in decades, not quarters - Formalize ideas with intellectual rigor - Challenge existing system boundaries - Operate independently without constant direction - Care about structural innovation over incremental gain This role is suited for builders who want to shape the long-term intelligence core of an AI-native company. **How Candidates Are Evaluated** Candidates are evaluated based on: - Their ability to formalize complex reasoning into structured systems - Evidence of pushing technical or decision boundaries - Clarity of thought in ambiguous domains - Ability to design experiments with rigor - Strategic alignment with long-term capability building We prioritize demonstrated intellectual depth and system-building ability over conventional titles. ## **Summary** The Head of R&D defines the next generation of Rwazi’s decision intelligence. This role ensures that as the market evolves, Rwazi advances beyond incremental product iteration — and continues to expand the frontier of what enterprise decision systems can reason about.