VP Research (Foundation Models)
Role summary by JobGrid
VP Research (Foundation Models) at Visium SA: Zürich, Switzerland; On-site; Full time; Executive; IT. JobGrid adds normalized role facts, source context, and a path to the employer application page so candidates can compare the listing before applying.
- Location and workplace: Zürich, Switzerland, On-site
- Role classification: IT, Data Science & ML, Full time, Executive
- Source freshness: checked by JobGrid on 2026-06-12.
- Application path: candidates continue to the employer application page with non-personal referral tags.
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.