Applied AI Research Engineer

Role overview

Applied AI Research Engineer serving as the first dedicated research engineering hire on a team building an AI layer for enterprise data products. The role owns the intelligence layer behind natural-language agents, turning "agent quality" into measurable metrics and shipping grounding and evaluation systems into production.

Responsibilities

- Design grounding systems that connect agent reasoning to verified enterprise data sources. - Build and optimize retrieval pipelines, including RAG, hybrid search, and structured query generation, for accuracy and latency. - Define data representation strategies that preserve semantic fidelity across heterogeneous enterprise data such as catalogs, schemas, and lineage. - Create evaluation frameworks: automated benchmarks, regression suites, and human evaluation protocols. - Convert validated research findings into production systems that ship to users. - Establish quality metrics and dashboards tracking agent correctness week over week and feed user interaction data back into evaluation datasets.

Requirements

- 3+ years of experience in information retrieval, NLP, knowledge representation, or applied ML research. - Production experience building RAG, grounding, or retrieval systems rather than prototypes or demos. - Strong evaluation methodology: benchmark design, statistical analysis, and reproducible experiments. - Comfort operating at the research and systems boundary, with the ability to read papers and ship code. - Python fluency plus experience with vector databases, embedding models, and LLM APIs. - Track record of turning research insights into shipped production systems.

Nice to have

- Familiarity with enterprise data systems such as SQL engines, data catalogs, and schema metadata. - Experience with text-to-SQL or structured query generation. - Published research or open-source contributions in IR, NLP, or evaluation methodology. - Experience designing evaluation pipelines that run in CI/CD. - Familiarity with JVM-based systems.

Benefits and work setup

- Pay range of $215,000 to $270,000 USD across U.S. locations. - Equity grants and a comprehensive benefits package. - Approximately 25% in-person travel for onboarding, offsites, customer engagements, and company events.