Applied ML Research Engineer (Production-Focused)

Valkai Incorporated; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical/Dental/Vision

Generous PTO

Parental Leave

Job summary

Valkai Incorporated is seeking a researcher with strong engineering ability to move between model training, experimentation, and applied AI systems, turning research outcomes into production-ready solutions in real workflows.

You will own applied research projects from problem definition to production validation, train and adapt models for reasoning, retrieval, and decision-making tasks, and collaborate with AI Strategy, product, and engineering teams to ship improvements to production.

Qualifications

• Deep ML foundations: understanding of learning, optimization, probability, and statistics to reason about model behavior and experiments.
• Hands-on model experience: trained, adapted, or improved models and explain decisions behind work.
• Research judgment: turn ambiguous problems into clear hypotheses and design experiments.
• Strong applied judgment: balance quality, reliability, latency, and cost in real workflows.
• High agency and ownership: define research direction and execute without waiting for a plan.
• Clear collaborators: communicate findings and uncertainty, help research, engineering, and product decisions.

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 capture real workflow difficulty.
• Inspect model outputs and agent traces, identify recurring failure modes, and turn findings into changes to training, data, or system design.
• Build experimentation tools and pipelines to run, compare, and 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

Collaborative communication

Job description

Valkai Incorporated is seeking a researcher with strong engineering ability to move between model training, experimentation, and applied AI systems, turning research outcomes into production-ready solutions in real workflows.

You will own applied research projects from problem definition to production validation, train and adapt models for reasoning, retrieval, and decision-making tasks, and collaborate with AI Strategy, product, and engineering teams to ship improvements to production.