Founding Research Engineer

present of AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Raindrop is seeking a founding research engineer to bridge research and production, focusing on how AI systems behave in real use and how to detect silent failures. You will design honest experiments, choose impactful questions, and contribute to building observability for production AI stacks.

Ideal candidates bring depth in ML or systems research, comfort with rapid experimentation, and sound judgment about which problems matter. This role sits close to product improvements in AI reliability.

Job description

A founding research engineer role usually asks for strong research skills plus the ability to turn ideas into working systems, often with little structure. A strong candidate brings depth in machine learning or systems research, comfort with fast experiments, and sound judgment about which problems matter. At a company building observability for production AI systems, that means caring about how models fail in real use, not just benchmark scores.

How it fits the AI era

Research engineering in AI is changing as models and tooling improve quickly, so much of the routine building gets faster and cheaper. What stays human is choosing the right questions, designing honest experiments, and judging whether a result actually holds up in production. This role sits close to that shift, since the product itself watches AI systems for silent failures.

How it builds AI experience

The work offers hands on exposure to evaluating AI systems in production, spotting failure modes, and building detection methods around them. That experience is best built by studying how models and agents break in real deployments and by running careful experiments on failure detection. A candidate can show this through projects that measure or catch AI errors rather than only through model training work.

Worth showing

• Systems building
• Clear technical writing

This is our own read, written from the employer's posting and the company's Spotlight. The employer's posting is the source of truth for the role.

About Raindrop

Agentic observability and issue detection platform identifying silent failures and tool errors in production AI systems, per the company.