Member of Technical Staff, Cortex Lab (applied AI research)

Confidential; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Performance-based bonuses

Health insurance reimbursement

401(k) plan with company match

Remote-first workforce

Job summary

Cortex Lab is seeking a hands-on Member of Technical Staff to develop, evaluate, and improve AI agents and LLM-powered systems operating in real-world enterprise workflows.

This role focuses on agent evaluations, failure analysis, and rapid experimentation, collaborating with researchers, engineers, domain experts, and enterprise customers to drive measurable improvements in AI system performance. Remote-first environment with strong compensation and benefits.

Qualifications

• Experience designing evaluations for AI agents.
• Ability to translate real-world problems into structured experiments.
• Strong Python and ML infrastructure skills.
• Experience working across research, engineering, and customers.

Responsibilities

• Design evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and datasets for LLM-powered agents and complex AI workflows.
• Identify, analyze, and prioritize model, agent, and workflow failures in real-world production environments.
• Run rapid experiments to validate hypotheses, measure performance, and improve agent reliability and effectiveness.
• Partner with enterprise customers and researchers to evaluate, deploy, and optimize AI systems across production workflows.
• Develop high-quality training and evaluation data, task specifications, and feedback mechanisms to improve system performance.
• Build Python-based evaluation pipelines, experimentation tools, and lightweight research infrastructure.

Skills

Applied AI research

Python programming

Evaluation pipelines

LLM-based systems

Experimental tooling

Collaboration

Tools

ML infra tooling

Benchmarks & datasets

Python libraries

Job description

Job Title: Member of Technical Staff, Cortex Lab (applied AI research)

Job Type: Full-time

Location: Remote

The Role

We're hiring a Member of Technical Staff (MTS) to develop, evaluate, and improve AI agents and LLM-powered systems operating in real-world enterprise workflows.

This is a hands-on applied research and engineering role focused on agent evaluations, failure analysis, and rapid experimentation. You'll work closely with researchers, engineers, domain experts, and enterprise customers to identify capability gaps, design rigorous evaluations, and drive measurable improvements in AI system performance.

You'll also contribute to research tooling and infrastructure that accelerates experimentation and evaluation.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and datasets for LLM-powered agents and complex AI workflows.
• Identify, analyze, and prioritize model, agent, and workflow failures in real-world production environments.
• Run rapid experiments to validate hypotheses, measure performance, and improve agent reliability and effectiveness.
• Partner with enterprise customers and researchers to evaluate, deploy, and optimize AI systems across production workflows.
• Develop high-quality training and evaluation data, task specifications, and feedback mechanisms to improve system performance.
• Build Python-based evaluation pipelines, experimentation tools, and lightweight research infrastructure.
• Collaborate with researchers, domain experts, and customer stakeholders to define evaluation strategies and optimization roadmaps.
• Contribute to technical reports, benchmarks, and research insights that inform future system improvements.

What We're Looking For

• Strong background in applied AI research, research engineering, machine learning, or LLM-based systems.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing evaluations for AI agents, including tool use, multi-step workflows, and task completion.
• Strong Python programming skills and experience building evaluation pipelines, experimental tooling, or ML infrastructure.
• Experience developing benchmarks, datasets, evaluation metrics, and experimental methodologies for AI systems.
• Ability to analyze agent failures, identify root causes, and translate findings into measurable performance improvements.
• Understanding of LLM behavior, agentic architectures, and common challenges in reliability, robustness, and generalization.
• Ability to translate ambiguous real-world problems into structured experiments and actionable technical solutions.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work across research, engineering, and customer teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience evaluating or optimizing AI agents in production or enterprise environments.
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning, reward modeling, or post-training techniques.
• Experience building research infrastructure, evaluation tooling, or automated experimentation frameworks.
• Prior experience at a frontier AI lab or in an applied AI research environment.
• Contributions to research publications, open-source benchmarks, or AI evaluation frameworks.
• Experience collaborating directly with enterprise customers or technical stakeholders.

Compensation & Benefits Notice

The national pay range for this full-time position is base salary of $200,000 –$250,000 USD. All employees are eligible for equity compensation, and employees may also receive performance-based bonuses, dependent on role and subject to company policies. our partner provides a comprehensive benefits package, including up to 100% reimbursement for health-insurance premiums, paid time off, a 401(K) plan with a company match, and additional benefits designed to support a high-performing, remote-first workforce.

our partner is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation during the application process, reach out to support@our partner.

Our hiring process utilizes artificial intelligence tools to assist in candidate screening and assessment. Our AI tools are designed to complement, not replace, human decision-making.

Disclaimer

The information contained in this job posting, including but not limited to role responsibilities, qualifications, compensation, and benefits, is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute a binding offer of employment. our partner reserves the right to amend, modify, or withdraw any portion of this posting at its sole discretion and without prior notice. All employment decisions are made in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.

This is a 100% remote contract role, open to applicants worldwide in the countries the employer accepts.