Research Engineer

Console Systems, Inc

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

Qualifications

  • Advanced degree or equivalent experience in software engineering, machine learning, or applied AI
  • Strong foundational knowledge in software engineering principles
  • Experience designing and implementing evals for AI systems
  • Familiarity with modern model adaptation techniques such as LoRA, SFT, and reinforcement learning
  • Demonstrated ability to manage projects end-to-end with an ownership mindset
  • Genuine interest in state-of-the-art research and optimization techniques

Responsibilities

  • Build and enhance the eval and optimization loop for core agents based on production usage
  • Systematically improve agent behavior across various components including prompts and model adaptations
  • Fine-tune and evaluate specialist models for high-volume tasks using clear production feedback
  • Collaborate with product and engineering teams to implement production improvements quickly
  • Work across the tech stack from evaluation infrastructure to customer-facing AI behavior

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work at the intersection of applied AI engineering and research
  • Contribution to the development of self-improving AI systems
  • Collaboration with cross-functional teams including product and engineering
  • Focus on real-world applications of AI, impacting customer operations
  • Potential to define the research culture as the company scales
Full Job Description
About the role

We're hiring a Research Engineer to push Console's core agent loop from powerful to truly self-improving. As more customers rely on Console to automate critical back-office operations, we need engineers who can turn real production traffic into better agents, evals, and specialist models.

This role sits at the intersection of applied AI engineering and research. You'll build the systems that let us measure, debug, and improve agent behavior in real-world conditions: production traces, offline replay, labeling workflows, eval harnesses, prompt and program optimization, and fine-tuning loops for high-volume agent tasks.

One of your first major focus areas will be improving how Console's agents reason over complex enterprise context. Our agents need to understand users, apps, devices, tickets, licenses, policies, and customer-specific data well enough to answer questions and take action reliably. You'll help turn this into a compounding optimization loop: using production traces, evals, assisted labeling, prompt/program optimization, and targeted model adaptation to make the system measurably better over time.

You'll work closely with product, engineering, and leadership to ship improvements into production quickly, while helping define what research at Console looks like as we scale.

What You'll Do

You'll build and improve AI systems that operate in real-world conditions, where reliability, speed, cost, and adaptability matter. At Console, you will:
  • Build the eval and optimization loop for Console's core agents, turning real production usage into measurable improvements in quality, latency, and reliability
  • Systematically improve agent behavior across prompts, programs, routing logic, constraints, and model adaptations, applying techniques like DSPy and GEPA where useful
  • Fine-tune, adapt, and evaluate specialist models for repeatable, high-volume agent tasks where Console has clear production feedback or verifiable quality signals
  • Work across the stack when needed, from traces and eval infrastructure to agent orchestration, product workflows, and customer-facing AI behavior


Who You Are

You're a product-minded research engineer who enjoys building real systems people depend on. You'll likely have:
  • Strong technical background in software engineering, machine learning, or applied AI, demonstrated through an advanced degree and/or equivalent experience building production AI systems
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and good judgment for designing, building, and debugging complex systems
  • Experience building evals for AI systems, including datasets, judges, metrics, offline replay, tracing, or regression testing
  • Practical understanding of modern model adaptation and post-training methods, including LoRA/QLoRA, SFT, distillation, preference optimization, reward modeling, DPO/GRPO, and reinforcement learning from verifiable feedback
  • Ownership mindset: you drive projects end-to-end, move quickly from real usage, and care about shipping measurable improvements
  • Enjoy following SOTA research into new models, agent architectures, evals, post-training methods, and optimization techniques

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