Senior AI Research Engineer – RAG, Agents & Evaluation

Cacheflow; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 192,000 - 259,800; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock equity

Health coverage

401(k) plan

Paid parental leave

Professional development stipends

Flexible vacation policy

Job summary

Cacheflow is seeking a Senior Applied Research Engineer to enhance the effectiveness of our AI systems through focused research and experimentation. This role involves designing information retrieval strategies and collaborating with engineers to turn validated approaches into production-ready systems.

The successful candidate will have over 6 years of experience in applied research and a strong foundation in NLP and information retrieval. Benefits include stock equity, health coverage, and flexible vacation policies.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in applied research, data science, or ML with a focus on NLP, information retrieval, or knowledge systems.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience building or contributing to production AI/ML systems.
• Strong foundation in information retrieval: dense and sparse retrieval, embedding models, search relevance.
• Experience with RAG systems: chunking strategies, vector databases, retrieval optimization.
• Proficiency in evaluation methodology: metrics design, golden dataset creation, A/B testing, statistical significance.
• Strong Python skills and comfort with notebook-driven research workflows.
• Experience communicating research findings to engineering teams and translating insights into actionable improvements.

Responsibilities

• Design and evaluate information access and reasoning strategies across RAG, agents, and classic ML.
• Prototype GenAI workflows that map and reason over compliance objects.
• Explore ML and probabilistic approaches for various tasks.
• Build and maintain evaluation frameworks: golden datasets, automated quality metrics.
• Implement and tune ranking/reranking systems.
• Run experiments to validate hypotheses and quantify improvements.
• Debug failure modes and build error taxonomies.
• Collaborate with AI and Software Engineers to hand off validated approaches.

Skills

Applied research

Data science

Machine Learning

Information retrieval

NLP

Python

A/B testing

Statistical significance

Job description

Cacheflow is seeking a Senior Applied Research Engineer to enhance the effectiveness of our AI systems through focused research and experimentation. This role involves designing information retrieval strategies and collaborating with engineers to turn validated approaches into production-ready systems.

The successful candidate will have over 6 years of experience in applied research and a strong foundation in NLP and information retrieval. Benefits include stock equity, health coverage, and flexible vacation policies.