Lead AI Research Engineer, Industrial Autonomy

Phaidra; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% remote

Competitive equity

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited paid time off

Parental leave

Company MacBook

Job summary

Phaidra is hiring an AI Research Engineer to shape the cognitive and behavioral layer of our agents. You will work at the intersection of applied AI research, software engineering, domain reasoning, and product judgment.

You will design prompts, guardrails, and evaluation systems to ensure agents are useful, interpretable, and aligned with user needs. You will help define agent behavior across customer-facing workflows, contribute to prompts and evaluation rubrics, and collaborate with product,

Qualifications

• Strong applied AI, machine learning, data science or software engineering background.
• Experience with LLMs, agents, copilots, autonomous workflows, or other AI systems that reason over tools and context.
• Ability to translate ambiguous product and domain problems into concrete experiments, prototypes, evals, and production improvements.
• Experience evaluating model or agent outputs using qualitative and quantitative methods.
• Strong product judgment: you understand what makes an AI system actually useful to users.

Responsibilities

• Design prompts, guardrails, evaluation systems, reasoning patterns, and feedback loops for agentic products.
• Own agent reasoning frameworks, personalities, tool-use policies, and execution loops.
• Build and maintain agent evaluations measuring quality, safety, and alignment with business requirements.
• Translate domain expertise into reusable reasoning patterns and evaluation rubrics.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to improve agent reliability and usefulness.
• Track state-of-the-art in agentive AI and behavioral assurance.

Skills

Applied AI

LLMs & agents

Product judgment

Python

Technical communication

Collaboration

Ambiguity handling

Tools

Python

Job description

Phaidra is hiring an AI Research Engineer to shape the cognitive and behavioral layer of our agents. You will work at the intersection of applied AI research, software engineering, domain reasoning, and product judgment.

You will design prompts, guardrails, and evaluation systems to ensure agents are useful, interpretable, and aligned with user needs. You will help define agent behavior across customer-facing workflows, contribute to prompts and evaluation rubrics, and collaborate with product,