Who We Are

Percepta’s mission is to transform critical institutions with applied AI. We care that industries that power the world (e.g. healthcare, manufacturing, energy) benefit from frontier technology.

To make that happen, we embed with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation. We bring together:

Forward-deployed expertise in engineering, product, and research

Mosaic, our in-house toolkit for rapidly deploying agentic workflows

Strategic partnerships with Anthropic, McKinsey, AWS, companies within the General Catalyst portfolio, and more

Our team is a quickly growing group of Applied AI Engineers, Embedded Product Managers and Researchers motivated by diffusing the promise of AI into improvements we can feel in our day to day lives.

Percepta is a direct partnership with General Catalyst, a global transformation and investment company.

About the role

As a Research Scientist - World Modeling at Percepta, you'll build the systems that let us understand an operation at its full complexity. Real operations rarely arrive as clean, structured data: the ground truth about the operation lives scattered across claims, clinical notes, call transcripts, contracts, and the tacit judgment of operators. You'll build models and agents that learn to compress this mess into a tractable, continuously-updated representation — effectively a digital twin of the operation — that forecasters, user models, and optimizers downstream can all reason and plan against.

Responsibilities

Design and build learned world models that compress messy, multi-modal operational data (notes, transcripts, contracts, telemetry) into tractable, decision-relevant representations.

Model the transition dynamics of real operations — how a workforce, facility, or network evolves state-to-state — so downstream systems can run counterfactuals before a decision touches a real person or asset.

Build and validate digital twins of customer operations, benchmarked against replayable, real-world testbeds with defensible ground truth.

Partner closely with the forecasting and optimization teams to ensure your representations are the right substrate for calibrated predictions and for finding optimal actions.

Bridge research into practice by partnering with engineers to deploy world models into live customer environments and push toward end-to-end production systems.

You may be a good fit if you

PhD degree in Computer Science, Operations Research, Industrial Engineering, or Applied Mathematics or have equivalent research/industry experience.

Have depth in simulation or world modeling

Have experience in novel machine learning techniques for control and optimization, including test-time search and reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making.

Are comfortable implementing and debugging large-scale optimization systems, and designing benchmarks with real, defensible ground truth.

Are motivated by impact in critical industries including healthcare, supply chains, energy, and finance.

Have a proven track record of execution.

Are an excellent communicator with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Enjoy extreme ownership.

Are passionate about AI's transformative potential

About Our Team

As an organization, Percepta is committed to inclusion and belonging, and our people are our greatest investment! We’re working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won’t be easy, but it will likely be the most fulfilling work of your career.

In addition to competitive compensation, equity, 401(k) matching, comprehensive health and family benefits, and lunch every day, we offer a culture built on autonomy and trust. We strongly believe that the boldest solutions come from teams who dream bigger together, and that means bringing in people from every kind of background, experience, and path. We are an office-first team that values the impact of in-person collaboration, but we focus on outcomes over outputs—believing that we are each responsible for solving the "whole problem" to make our customers win.