Machine Learning Engineer, Evals

NOUS RESEARCH

$130K — $160K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 3+ years in software or ML engineering, data science, or similar roles with evaluation experience
  • Experience with an LLM evaluation framework, offering critical insights on its strengths and weaknesses
  • Hands-on experience with LLMs in prompting, few-shot design, and ideally fine-tuning or retrieval-augmented generation
  • Proficient in Python, producing clean, tested, and maintained code
  • Familiarity with Git, CI/CD, Docker, and Linux command line tools
  • Understanding of evaluation statistics and metrics relevant to model assessments
  • Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively with both technical and research teams.

Responsibilities

  • Run the complete evaluation pipeline and replicate results during onboarding with senior engineer support
  • Develop a judge calibration protocol that ensures reproducibility and transparency
  • Enhance existing benchmarks with new tasks to bridge capability gaps
  • Conduct failure analyses on model outputs and provide actionable recommendations
  • Manage and deliver a regular evaluation workflow that meets researchers' needs

Benefits

  • High-growth, high-ownership role on a small, impactful team
  • Immediate opportunity to ship foundational evaluation infrastructure
  • Engagement in meaningful research supporting model evaluation
  • Dynamic work environment with a focus on collaboration and innovation
  • Opportunity to work with cutting-edge LLM technologies and benchmarks
Full Job Description
You'll work across the lab on agent capability evals, benchmark design, LLM-as-judge systems, failure analysis, and the infrastructure that ties it together. This is a high-growth, high-ownership role on a small team, and you'll ship evaluation infrastructure that researchers depend on from day one.

Responsibilities:
  • Run the full eval pipeline end to end and reproduce known results during onboarding, pairing with a senior engineer on your first task
  • Build a judge calibration protocol: sample human-labeled decisions, measure agreement (κ, per-class P/R), identify drift zones, and document it so anyone can re-run it
  • Extend an existing benchmark (GAIA, τ-Bench, SWE-bench slice, etc.) with new tasks targeting known capability gaps, including the prompt, environment, rubric, automated grader, and QA
  • Run failure analysis on model outputs: categorize failure modes, quantify prevalence, and write up findings with recommendations for training data, judge prompts, or benchmark changes
  • Own a recurring eval workflow (weekly regression suite, judge drift dashboard, red-team evaluation for a new capability) and ship tooling researchers actually use

Qualifications:
  • 3+ years in software engineering, ML engineering, data science, or a research-adjacent role, with concrete evaluation experience from coursework, an internship, a side project, open source work, or a job
  • Experience with at least one LLM evaluation framework (Harbor, Nemo Evaluator, etc.), with real opinions on what it does well and where it falls short
  • Hands-on experience with LLMs: prompting, few-shot design, and ideally fine-tuning or RAG; regular use of coding agents
  • Solid Python. You write clean, tested, version-controlled code that a colleague could run without you babysitting it
  • Comfort with Git, CI/CD basics, Docker, and the Linux command line (SSH, tmux, debugging a remote job)
  • Understanding of basic eval statistics: why accuracy misleads on imbalanced judges, what Cohen's κ measures, how to think about confidence intervals on a metric
  • At least 3 of the following: you can explain why LLM-as-judge needs calibration; you've done failure analysis and can tell model bugs apart from prompt, grader, or retrieval issues; you know at least two agent benchmarks (GAIA, AgentBench, τ-Bench, MINT, SWE-bench, WebShop, ALFWorld) and a limitation of each; you've designed or extended an eval dataset with happy paths, edge cases, and adversarial examples; you've thought about non-determinism in eval, how you sample, how many runs, how you report variance
  • You communicate clearly to both researchers and engineers, in the right language for each
  • You're comfortable with ambiguity, can turn a half-formed request into a plan, and know when to ask for help

Preferred:
  • RLVR / RLHF pipeline experience
  • Training data curation experience
  • Distributed eval orchestration experience
  • Benchmark design from scratch
  • Red teaming and adversarial eval experience
  • Familiarity with psychometrics or measurement theory

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