Applied AI Engineer

Raydar; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental and vision

Life and disability insurance

401(k) with automatic enrollment

Unlimited paid time off

Parental leave

Mental health support

Fertility and family-building support

Equity

Job summary

Raydar is seeking a hands-on AI research engineer to build and evaluate AI agents that run in production, turning new research into reliable live-data systems.

The role blends engineering and experimentation, giving you ownership over how results are measured, validated and shipped to production. You will design evaluation frameworks, address model reliability and inference costs, and contribute to production infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Experience at high-growth technology companies or AI research labs.
• A practical record of building sophisticated automated software and networked computing systems.
• Background designing testing tools that measure how automated assistants perform.
• Proficiency in Python programming.
• A background from a top university.
• A clearly demonstrable track record, such as an Olympiad result, a major hackathon win, a widely used open-source project or published AI research.

Responsibilities

• Design and run applied research programs on model reliability, inference cost and output quality.
• Build evaluation frameworks that judge the full sequence of an agent's actions, not only its final output.
• Contribute to how automated assistants store, look up and use prior information.
• Convert research findings into production infrastructure with measurable impact.
• Help set the direction and priorities of the applied research work.

Skills

Python

Education

Top university background

Tools

Testing frameworks

Job description

About the company

Our client is a fast-growing software company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Build and evaluate AI agents that run in production, turning new research into working systems that handle live data under strict reliability targets. The role blends hands‑on engineering with experimentation, and gives the successful candidate ownership of how results are measured and shipped.

What you'll do

• Design and run applied research programs on model reliability, inference cost and output quality.
• Build evaluation frameworks that judge the full sequence of an agent's actions, not only its final output.
• Contribute to how automated assistants store, look up and use prior information.
• Convert research findings into production infrastructure with measurable impact.
• Help set the direction and priorities of the applied research work.

Requirements

What we're looking for

• Experience at high-growth technology companies or AI research labs.
• A practical record of building sophisticated automated software and networked computing systems.
• Background designing testing tools that measure how automated assistants perform.
• Proficiency in Python programming.
• A background from a top university.
• A clearly demonstrable track record, such as an Olympiad result, a major hackathon win, a widely used open-source project or published AI research.

Bonus points

• Quantitative analytics background, including work in finance.
• Experience with knowledge graph systems, reinforcement learning for agents, production machine learning or post-training of models.

Benefits

Compensation and benefits

• Base salary: $200K to $275K per year
• Equity
• Health, dental and vision coverage
• Life and disability insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan with automatic enrollment
• Unlimited paid time off
• Paid sick leave, company holidays and bereavement leave
• Paid parental leave
• Mental health support and virtual care
• Fertility and family-building support

Location and work model

• San Francisco, California, United States
• On-site, 5 days in-office
• Full-time