AI Research Engineer

Meta; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Meta is hiring Research Engineers to work at the intersection of frontier AI and real-world product impact. You will be embedded in Facebook’s ecosystem, shaping how people discover content, connect with creators, and interact with each other.

You’ll contribute to post-training pipelines, evaluation methods, and production serving systems, tackling open research questions with immediate product consequences. This role offers ownership and strong influence on technical direction at scale.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• Formal technical lead experience with cross-functional impact.
• Strong engineering background; PhD not required.
• Experience in AI/ML environments and data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to training of multimodal foundation models for product use-cases.
• Spearhead data sourcing and curation for pre/mid/post-training stages.
• Lead research on multimodal reasoning and generation with direct product impact.

Skills

Lead experience

AI/ML background

Data pipelines & versioning

Cross-team influence

Engineering excellence

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE or related field

Job description

We’re hiring Research Engineers to join teams across Meta working at the intersection of frontier AI and real-world product impact. You’ll be embedded directly in Facebook’s ecosystem, helping reimagine core experiences and reshape how people discover content, connect with creators, and interact with each other.

The work spans some of the most bold bets in applied GenAI, including:

• Building the post-training, evaluation, and serving systems that turn frontier LLMs into reliable, high-quality product experiences used by billions.
• Building a general-purpose agentic platform that powers a wide range of GenAI products across Facebook — enabling teams to ship faster, safer, and at scale.
• Building systems that enable capacity and cost optimizations through model fine-tuning, post-training and other techniques.
• Adapting and scaling these systems across Meta’s products.

Why Join Us

• Product LLM work at singular scale. Your post-training decisions, evaluation frameworks, and serving architecture directly affect billions of daily interactions.
• End-to-end ownership. We don't hand off models to a separate product team. We own the loop from training data to production behavior to measurement. The impact of your work shows up in days, not quarters.
• The problems are unsolved. How do you evaluate open-ended conversational AI at scale? How do you fine-tune for groundedness across millions of varied creator profiles? These aren't incremental improvements, they're open research questions with immediate product consequences.
• Our team is hands-on, with high autonomy, working on critical bets. We're deliberately keeping this team lean and experienced. You'll have outsized influence on technical direction, not just execution.
• Depending on your interests and strengths, your work could span post-training pipelines (SFT, RLHF, synthetic data generation), evaluation methodology (auto-judge design, benchmark construction, human-AI calibration), production serving systems (RAG, memory, multi-modal generation), multi-agent orchestration, or E2E experience of building agentic products,
• all grounded in shipping to real users at scale

AI Research Engineer Responsibilities

• Contribute to the training of next-generation multimodal foundation models, advance their capabilities in understanding, generation, and grounding, and enable them for downstream product use-cases
• Support creative data sourcing, high-quality pre/mid/post-training data curation, and scale and optimize data pipelines for multimodal large language models (LLMs)
• Lead, collaborate, and execute on research that pushes forward the state of the art in multimodal reasoning and generation research, and prioritize research that can be directly applied to Meta’s product development

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience as a formal technical lead, leading major technical initiatives with XFN impact, and/or influencing strategy across multiple teams
• Impressive engineering background (PhD in ML not required)
• Experience working in AI/ML environments
• Can manage data pipelines and versioning

About Meta

Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today—beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics.

Meta is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Aff… We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Meta participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. Please note that Meta may leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in connection with applications for employment. Meta is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at [e-mail].

$183,997/year to $257,000/year + bonus + equity + benefits

Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate, monthly rate, or annual salary only, and do not include bonus, equity or sales incentives, if applicable. In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits. Learn more about benefits at Meta.