Applied AI Research Engineer — Mission-Focused Prototyping

Orbis; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Orbis is seeking a lead applied researcher to advance AI capabilities across agentic AI, knowledge representation, and high‑performance analytics. You will frame problems, survey existing work, build prototypes, and run rigorous experiments with reproducible methods, driving results into production with product engineers.

Travel up to 20% will be required for conferences and collaborations. You will contribute to publications, open‑source releases, and strategic advisory on field trends, shaping

Qualifications

• 3+ years of applied research or research-engineering experience, or an MS/PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field with equivalent applied work
• Strong Python engineering skills, producing research code another engineer can read, run, and build on
• Demonstrated experience designing and running experiments that produced an actionable conclusion, with defendable methodology
• Depth in at least one Orbis AI focus area: agentic AI, knowledge representation, dynamic ontologies, autonomous analysis, or high-performance analytics
• Working knowledge of modern LLM and retrieval methods and their practical limitations
• Clear technical writing that makes a result legible to engineers and non-specialist stakeholders
• Willingness to travel up to 20%

Responsibilities

• Frame research problems drawn from real product and mission gaps, define what a result must show to be worth productizing, and survey existing work before building
• Build prototypes that isolate the question being asked, at the fidelity the question actually requires
• Run rigorous experiments — baselines, ablations, held-out evaluation, and honest error analysis — with methodology another engineer can reproduce
• Build and maintain the datasets and evaluation harnesses your area depends on, including cases that capture known failure modes
• Report results clearly, negative results included, and make a defensible recommendation to continue, pivot, or stop
• Transition validated results into production alongside product engineers, staying involved through the handoff rather than delivering a notebook
• Contribute to the scientific community through publications, open-source releases, and academic collaborations, and advise Orbis on what in the field is worth adopting
• Travel up to 20% for conferences, customer engagement, and team collaboration.

Skills

Python engineering

Experiment design

Research execution

AI focus areas

LLM & retrieval

Technical writing

Travel readiness

Education

MS/PhD in CS/ML or related

Tools

Python

Experimentation frameworks

Retrieval methods

Job description

Orbis is seeking a lead applied researcher to advance AI capabilities across agentic AI, knowledge representation, and high‑performance analytics. You will frame problems, survey existing work, build prototypes, and run rigorous experiments with reproducible methods, driving results into production with product engineers.

Travel up to 20% will be required for conferences and collaborations. You will contribute to publications, open‑source releases, and strategic advisory on field trends, shaping