Founding AI Research Engineer

Catapult; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Generous stock options

Healthcare (Bupa)

Pension scheme

Nursery benefit

34 days holiday

Visa sponsorship (London)

Equipment provided

Job summary

Catapult is seeking a highly capable researcher/engineer to push the frontier and build end-to-end systems from idea to product. You will tackle agentic systems, retrieval/knowledge-base work, data processing, evaluation, and experimentation while delivering robust, scalable products.

You’ll work largely independently, identifying critical problems and delivering complete end-to-end solutions. The role blends rigorous research with practical software engineering in a fast-moving environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience solving research or engineering problems.
• Strong record of solving hard problems in academic or industrial settings.
• Ability to develop your own research problems and translate to scalable products.
• Able to learn quickly, read frontier papers, and articulate ideas clearly.

Responsibilities

• Identify and solve genuinely difficult technical and research problems.
• Deliver end-to-end solutions from idea to product with minimal external help.
• Form hypotheses, build systems, and carry them to production.

Skills

Independent work

Problem solving

Research-to-product

Fast learner

Job description

The role

This role combines research, pushing the frontier of what's known, and engineering, taking that work and building end-to-end from idea to product.

The research component is broad, and includes focuses on agentic systems (compaction systems, coding agents, managing sub-agents, etc), retrieval and knowledge-base systems, pre-processing and managing large swaths of data, evaluation and experimental setup, etc.

This work is end-to-end and goes well beyond just the research component, often including: forming and testing hypotheses, building the system, and carrying it through to a product people use.

You’ll love this role if you enjoy…

• Identifying and solving genuinely difficult technical and research-level problems.
• Working very independently. We expect each person in the team to be able to identify critical problems, and manage a complete end-to-end solution with minimal external help.
• Both the challenges of research and the hard work (and judgement) needed to create something wonderful in the real world.

Requirements and experience

• 5+ years of experience working on similar research or engineering problems or at least 2+ years of work and clear evidence of excellence.
• A strong record of solving hard problems in academic or industrial environments.
• The ability to develop your own research problem and problem, and leverage that to build robust and scalable products.
• The ability to learn very quickly, comfort reading frontier papers and digesting them in minutes, the ability to explain ideas clearly and quickly.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and truly generous stock options.
• Comprehensive Bupa Private Healthcare and wellbeing allowances.
• A tax-efficient pension scheme with salary sacrifice.
• Generous workplace nursery benefit.
• 34 days of paid holiday, including public holidays.
• Work-visa sponsorship so you can come build with us in person in London.
• All the equipment you need to perform at your very best.