Research Engineer, Applied AI Engineering

The role

This is a backend-focused software engineering role specializing in applying ML/AI to user-facing products. You will work on systems that power the AI/data pipeline including prompt chaining, eval design, research APIs, model routing, and prod orchestration.

What you will do

• Build and improve production AI/data pipelines across LLMs, APIs, databases, and workflow systems.
• Design evals and build Jupyter notebooks to measure model behavior, data quality, extraction accuracy, and customer impact.
• Build observability into AI workflows to understand cost, latency, reliability, and quality.
• Experiment with new models, retrieval strategies, structured-output techniques, prompt/program architectures, and model-routing approaches.
• Integrate with research and AI APIs and build robust abstractions around them.
• Help define the foundation for future inference serving, fine-tuning, dataset generation, and model evaluation infrastructure.

Required qualifications

• Strong engineer who can reason through distributed systems, data pipelines, and databases.
• Comfortable working across varying programming languages.
• Extremely AI-fluent and actively use modern AI tools to move faster.
• Strong first-principles thinking to turn ambiguous problems into hypotheses, experiments, and shipped systems.
• Good judgment and taste to simplify aggressively and care about maintainability.
• Care about measurement using evals, tests, traces, or data.

Nice to have

• Experience with PyTorch
• Experience with Hugging Face
• Experience with vLLM
• Experience with Ray
• Experience with MLflow
• Experience with RAG
• Experience with fine-tuning & RL
• Experience with inference serving
• Experience with model evaluation systems

Benefits

• Early seat to help shape the DNA of the Applied AI Engineering org
• Meaningful equity in a venture-backed company

About the company

OuterSignal is building the customer intelligence layer for commerce. They provide a platform that enriches orders in real time with professional and personal signals to build personas and power outreach.