Research Engineer: AI Twin Systems & Scalable Experiments

outset; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Outset is redefining how research is conducted with AI-powered user interviews. The Research Engineer will ensure experiments run exactly as designed, with reproducible results and scalable pipelines, under the Head Scientist.

You will enable scientists to test modeling approaches, manage data pipelines, and keep code aligned with the shipped product. You should have several years of software engineering experience in a research setting, strong Python skills, cloud exposure, and familiarity with

Qualifications

• Several years of software engineering experience, including work in a lab or comparable research setting.
• Strong Python; ability to read/audit code from AI agents and tooling.
• Experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines for human behavior data.
• Fundamentals: file systems, libraries, databases, SQL, tabular data, Git workflows.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and running many jobs concurrently.
• Understanding of ML and transformer models, model APIs, and fine-tuning basics.
• Code written should be deterministic, reproducible, cost-aware, and well-documented.

Responsibilities

• Own evaluation infrastructure to test competing modeling approaches.
• Implement measurement pipelines with deterministic, traceable outputs.
• Maintain versioned evaluation datasets with held-out sets.
• Build and maintain data pipelines for human-participant data and model training data.
• Keep research code in step with production product for timely shipping of improvements.
• Detect and prevent threats to evaluation validity.
• Track compute and API spend across experiments and production costs.
• Manage repositories, code review, and reproducibility of coding workflow.
• Identify implementation choices for correctness and efficiency and propose changes.

Skills

Software engineering

Python

Cloud infrastructure

ML fundamentals

Deterministic/reproducible coding

Git-based workflows

Tools

vLLM

SGLang

SQL

Git

Job description

Outset is redefining how research is conducted with AI-powered user interviews. The Research Engineer will ensure experiments run exactly as designed, with reproducible results and scalable pipelines, under the Head Scientist.

You will enable scientists to test modeling approaches, manage data pipelines, and keep code aligned with the shipped product. You should have several years of software engineering experience in a research setting, strong Python skills, cloud exposure, and familiarity with