Applied AI Research Engineer: Grounding & RAG for Enterprise Data

Starburst; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 215,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity: ISOs

Comprehensive benefits

Competitive pay

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Starburst in San Francisco, CA is seeking an Applied AI Research Engineer to own the intelligence layer for AIDA, connecting agent reasoning to verified data and turning research into production. You will work across information retrieval, knowledge representation, and evaluation, shipping end-to-end experiments from hypothesis to deployment while collaborating with a fast-moving team.

This role requires building grounding systems, retrieval pipelines, and measurable quality metrics, with travel

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in information retrieval, NLP, knowledge representation, or applied ML research.
• Production experience building RAG, grounding, or retrieval systems (not prototypes or demos).
• Strong evaluation methodology: benchmark design, statistical analysis, reproducible experiments.
• Comfort operating at the research/systems boundary: you read papers and you ship code.
• Python fluency; experience with vector databases, embedding models, LLM APIs.
• Track record of converting research insights into shipped production systems.

Responsibilities

• Design grounding systems that connect agent reasoning to verified enterprise data sources.
• Build and optimize retrieval pipelines (RAG, hybrid search, structured query generation).
• Define data representation strategies that preserve semantic fidelity across heterogeneous data.
• Create evaluation frameworks: automated benchmarks, regression suites, human protocols.
• Convert validated research findings into production systems deployed to users.
• Establish quality metrics and dashboards tracking agent correctness weekly.
• Build feedback loops where user data informs grounding improvements.

Skills

Information retrieval

NLP

Knowledge representation

Applied ML research

Python

Vector databases

Embedding models

LLM APIs

Production systems

Job description

Starburst in San Francisco, CA is seeking an Applied AI Research Engineer to own the intelligence layer for AIDA, connecting agent reasoning to verified data and turning research into production. You will work across information retrieval, knowledge representation, and evaluation, shipping end-to-end experiments from hypothesis to deployment while collaborating with a fast-moving team.

This role requires building grounding systems, retrieval pipelines, and measurable quality metrics, with travel