Research Engineer

The Role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Join as an early technical hire on a small team that blends research with production engineering. You will design measurement tooling and data workflows for machine learning models, run and study training experiments, and convert promising results into dependable shared platform components. The role involves close collaboration with the founders.

What You'll Do

Create assessment frameworks, scoring tools and data workflows drawn from real-world usage records.

Take charge of model training efforts in live settings, covering data preparation, assessment and training runs, with the aim of improving quality, cost and latency.

Develop simulated environments and test harnesses that make experiments repeatable and generate training data.

Carry out and interpret experiments, replicate promising published work and troubleshoot the surrounding systems.

Harden successful experiments into dependable platform components used by colleagues and customers.

What We're Looking For

Solid coding ability, with Python preferred, plus a firm grounding in machine learning and computer science fundamentals.

2 to 4 years as a machine learning engineer, research engineer or similar at an AI-focused startup or lab, or an exceptional early-career engineer with research lab experience and clear product sense.

A significant piece of work, such as a project, published research or a production system, that shows depth and a strong sense of ownership.

A track record of exploring how models are refined or served, shown through experiments, publications, open-source contributions or startup work.

Quick at getting up to speed on new codebases, comfortable debugging alone and able to communicate technical choices plainly.

A habit of verifying results and seeing work through to completion.

Degree from a top 25 university.

Ability to work on-site five days a week.

Bonus Points

Public technical writing such as research papers or blog posts.

Experience spanning several layers of the machine learning stack, for example evaluation and training, or training and serving.

Hands-on experience with PyTorch, large language model training, evaluation harnesses or model serving.

Location And Work Model

Mountain View, CA, United States

On-site, 5 days per week in office

Full-time

Compensation, As The Posting Describes It

Equity