Throwaway for obvious reasons.

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Background: I am currently finishing up a PhD in physics (at a top 10 place, if that matters) and got into ML two years ago. I have been lucky enough to collaborate with some ML researchers at my institution and have published a few (~4) papers at top conferences. Two of them are first author papers, but none have really gotten that much attention (I do have several hundred citations but mostly for my physics publications).

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I have spent the last few months looking for research scientist positions at industry labs. Unfortunately I was unable to secure a research scientist position, but was recently offered a “postdoc” position at a well-known lab. Basically they said that that they want to hire me in this position for a year and then potentially promote me to a “research scientist” position depending on my performance.

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I was surprised since I didn’t know postdoc positions even existed in industry (but they told me that this type of position is typically offered to students who are taking a year off before becoming faculty). While the salary is not too bad (~130K), they are giving me no stock. My ML PhD friends have told me that you can typically expect 100K+ in stock that vests over a few years when you join as a reserach scientist with a industy research lab. So I am not too happy in terms of total compensation.

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I do have another job lined up (quant finance) that pays substantially more (300K+), but it is not a research position. Any advice on what to do? Is there a chance that the industry lab would consider giving stock to a “postdoc”? Anyone else have taken such a postdoc position?