The first wave of AI was about scale. The frontier now is reliable AI: systems that are not only capable, but understandable, testable, and dependable in real decisions. At Seekr, explainability is not a reporting layer added after deployment; it is a core product and research problem spanning attribution and interpretability, observability, and contestability. This role sits directly in that high-impact space, helping turn state-of-the-art ideas into production capabilities customers can trust.
We are open to candidates from either research scientist or engineering backgrounds. Success in this role requires strength in one domain, and working proficiency in the other.
Duties and Responsibilities- Design and build explainability capabilities that help users understand why a model or agent produced a given output and what training data, retrieved documents, tools, agent interactions, or internal model mechanisms influenced that result.
- Design and build contestability capabilities that enable users to challenge AI outputs, capture corrective feedback, and turn contested results into data that improves systems over time.
- Work on adjacent high-impact areas such as hallucination detection and mitigation, and continual-learning agents that can learn from explainability signals and contested outputs.
- Translate and synthesize promising ideas from current literature into prototypes, and translate validated prototypes into production-grade features.
- Contribute across the AI system lifecycle where needed, including model development, inference, deployment, and monitoring.
- Partner with product, design, and customer-facing teams to make explainability useful in real workflows, not just technically interesting.
- Use AI coding assistants effectively and reliably as part of a modern engineering workflow while maintaining strong judgment and code quality.
Qualifications and Skills Required: - 8+ years of experience in AI engineering and/or AI research/science roles, or equivalent relevant experience.
- Strong background in machine learning and modern AI systems, including LLM/VLMs, agent frameworks, RAG, or adjacent applied ML systems.
- Ability to move comfortably between research and engineering.
- Scientists here should be able to write production-grade code when needed; engineers here should be able to prototype and pressure-test systems inspired by state-of-the-art papers.
- Experience designing experiments and evaluating ambiguous technical tradeoffs.
- Fluency with AI coding assistants and the modern developer workflows they enable.
- Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals, with comfort in testing, code review, CI/CD, debugging, and performance analysis.
- Clear communication and strong collaboration across technical and non-technical partners.
- Reside near Austin, TX or Reston, VA and able to work 3 days per week in office
Preferred Qualifications, Research Scientist-Leaning Candidates: - Master's or PhD in computer science, machine learning, AI, statistics, or a related field preferred.
- Experience in explainable and interpretable AI, such as feature attribution methods like LIME and SHAP, example- or influence-based attribution, or mechanistic interpretability.
- Track record of original technical work, such as publications, patents, open-source contributions, or research that materially shaped shipped systems.
Preferred Qualifications, Engineer-Leaning Candidates:- Designs end-to-end AI systems spanning data preparation, evaluation, serving, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
- Works with inference and serving stacks such as vLLM, SGLang, or similar systems.
- Optimizes model serving for latency, throughput, batching, caching, memory efficiency, quantization, and cost/performance tradeoffs.
- Develops APIs/SDKs and builds usable platform abstractions for other developers.
- Deploys with Kubernetes-based workflows, CI/CD, and GitOps tools such as Argo CD.
- Works within GPU/accelerator environments, containerized ML workloads, and production performance tuning; familiarity with custom GPU/accelerator kernels for AI workload optimization is a plus.
- Designs database and retrieval systems, including relational stores, vector databases, and RAG architectures.
- Builds experiment tracking, model/data versioning, and evaluation pipelines, with strong observability and production issue diagnosis in AI systems.
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Company Benefits:- Meaningful Mission & Impact - Work with a deeply talented, collaborative team solving some of the toughest AI challenges that matter.
- Equity Ownership - RSUs that let you share directly in Seekr's long-term success and growth.
- Time Off That Respects Real Life - Unlimited PTO plus 14 paid company holidays to truly recharge.
- Work Your Way - A flexible hybrid work environment with offices in Reston, VA and Austin, TX.
- Competitive Total Rewards - A role-appropriate compensation structure that supports long-term growth, including base salary, bonuses, or commission plans depending on role.
- 401(k) with Company Match - Build your future with a retirement plan that includes employer matching.
- Comprehensive Health & Wellness - Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance coverage starting day one-for you and your family.
- Parental Leave - Paid parental leave to support employees as they welcome a new child through birth, adoption, or foster placement.
