Applied AI Research Engineer — Early-Career, Hybrid

Orbis; McLean (VA); Hybrid; USD 85,000 - 135,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive retirement matching

Paid time off (PTO)

Job summary

Orbis in McLean, VA is seeking an entry-level AI researcher to support applied research in agentic AI, knowledge representation, dynamic ontologies, autonomous analysis, and high-performance analytics. You will reproduce baselines, build evaluation datasets and harnesses, run experiments, and write up what actually happened.

This role exists to bring strong early-career engineers into applied AI research and grow them toward owning a research area.

Qualifications

• 0-2 years of professional experience.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, or equivalent demonstrated ability.
• Solid programming fundamentals in Python, with code you can walk us through and defend.
• Working understanding of machine learning and LLM fundamentals — evaluation basics, prompting, embeddings, and retrieval.
• Ability to read a technical paper and explain what it claims, how it was evaluated, and where it might not hold.
• Intellectual honesty about results, including the ones that undercut a hypothesis you liked.
• Willingness to travel occasionally, up to 10%.

Responsibilities

• Reproduce baselines and published methods, and document precisely where your results diverge from what was reported.
• Build and maintain evaluation datasets and harnesses, including cases that capture known failure modes.
• Run experiments designed with senior research engineers, keeping records complete enough that someone else can rerun them.
• Perform error analysis — characterize what the system got wrong and why, and report it without smoothing it over.
• Implement well-scoped prototype components with design direction and code review from senior engineers.
• Summarize relevant literature and open-source work, and explain how it bears on the question at hand.
• Write up results, negative results included, and present them in team research reviews.
• Travel occasionally, up to 10%, for conferences, training, and team collaboration.

Skills

Python programming

ML fundamentals

Reading technical papers

Travel willingness

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS/ML or related field

Tools

Docker

Job description

Orbis in McLean, VA is seeking an entry-level AI researcher to support applied research in agentic AI, knowledge representation, dynamic ontologies, autonomous analysis, and high-performance analytics. You will reproduce baselines, build evaluation datasets and harnesses, run experiments, and write up what actually happened.

This role exists to bring strong early-career engineers into applied AI research and grow them toward owning a research area.