Applied AI Research Engineer

Valkai; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity

Medical/dental/vision insurance

Generous PTO

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Valkai is seeking a researcher with strong engineering ability to turn difficult problems into research questions, and to develop improvements across models and agent systems.

You will move between model training, experimentation, and applied AI systems, selecting the right approach for real users and production.” You will own applied research projects, train and adapt models for reasoning, retrieval, and decision-making tasks, and collaborate with engineering and product to ship improvements to

Qualifications

• Deep ML foundations: understanding of learning, optimization, probability, statistics.
• Hands-on model experience: trained/adapted/improved models and explain decisions.
• Research judgment: turn ambiguous problems into clear hypotheses and experiments.
• Strong applied judgment: balance quality, reliability, latency, and cost in real workflows.
• High agency and ownership: define research direction and own outcomes.
• Clear collaborators: communicate findings and help decision-making across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own applied research projects from problem definition and experiment design through implementation and production validation.
• Train and adapt models for reasoning, retrieval, and decision-making tasks.
• Develop and test improvements to agent systems, including tool use, context, memory, planning, and recovery from failures.
• Build datasets, evaluation environments, and grading methods that reflect real workflow difficulty.
• Inspect model outputs and agent traces to identify failure modes and drive training/data/system changes.
• Build experimentation tools and pipelines to run, compare, reproduce research efficiently.
• Partner with AI Strategy, product, and engineering to understand workflows and ship improvements to production.

Skills

Deep ML foundations

Hands-on model experience

Research judgment

Strong applied judgment

High agency and ownership

Clear collaborators

Job description

Valkai is seeking a researcher with strong engineering ability to turn difficult problems into research questions, and to develop improvements across models and agent systems.

You will move between model training, experimentation, and applied AI systems, selecting the right approach for real users and production.” You will own applied research projects, train and adapt models for reasoning, retrieval, and decision-making tasks, and collaborate with engineering and product to ship improvements to