Applied Research Engineer

Applied Compute

$120K — $160K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of AI research experience in industry or academics
  • Ability to navigate complex codebases and data systems
  • Strong problem-solving skills in dynamic environments
  • Experience interacting with customers and understanding their needs
  • Desire to manage projects from inception to completion

Responsibilities

  • Train and deploy models for enterprise applications
  • Manage customer engagements from start to finish
  • Quickly adapt to new architectures and data requirements
  • Gather and apply insights from customers to enhance platform capabilities
  • Collaborate across teams to shape architectures and best practices

Benefits

  • Competitive compensation and equity
  • Comprehensive health benefits
  • Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
  • Paid parental leave
  • Meals provided at the office
  • Support for transportation and relocation
  • Retirement savings plans
Full Job Description
The role

As an applied research engineer, you'll own customer engagements end-to-end: understanding their data, their workflows, and their problems, then building and deploying agents that deliver real value. For our largest customers, you'll train custom models tailored to their specific needs. For others, you'll take what you learn and bring it back to improve our general agents.

What you'll do
  • Train and post-train models for enterprises, from environment design through deployment
  • Own engagements end-to-end, working directly with technical and business stakeholders
  • Navigate new customer architectures, data systems, and requirements quickly
  • Surface learnings from customers and contribute them back to our platform
  • Collaborate across research, product, and infrastructure to define architectures, evaluation frameworks, and best practices

What we're looking for
  • Meaningful AI research experience, either in industry or academic work
  • Comfort diving into unfamiliar codebases and training models on real-world, messy data
  • Strong problem-solving skills, especially in ambiguous, fast-changing environments
  • Ability to work directly with customers: listening, empathizing, and understanding how their organizations operate
  • Desire to own problems end-to-end and deliver outcomes

Strong candidates also have
  • Experience training or fine-tuning language models in production settings
  • Background building RL environments, evaluation frameworks, or agent systems
  • Previous experience as a founder or early engineer at a zero-to-one company
  • Technical creativity through side projects, open source contributions, or published work
  • Experience at companies with forward-deployed or customer-facing engineering cultures


Benefits & Logistics

This role is based in San Francisco. We work from our office in the Mission. We offer:
  • Competitive compensation and equity
  • Generous health benefits
  • Unlimited PTO
  • Paid parental leave
  • Daily lunches and dinners
  • Transportation and relocation support
  • Retirement plans

We sponsor visas. While we can't guarantee success for every candidate or role, if you're the right fit, we're committed to working through the process with you. We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.

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