Applied Research Engineer

Duku AI; Durban; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity ownership

Unlimited resources for projects

Direct involvement in decision-making

Job summary

Duku AI in Durban, South Africa is seeking an exceptional Applied Research Engineer to push the boundaries of reinforcement learning in software development. This unique role invites creativity and innovation, focusing on creating autonomous agents that test software and optimize performance before release.

Expect to see your prototypes running live within three months, with real impacts by year-end. Join a pioneering team with the ambition to reshape the industry, offering substantial equity and resources to succeed.

Qualifications

• 5+ years shipping ML to production (real systems, not papers).
• Deep RL expertise, understanding of Q-values and policy gradients.
• Experience building autonomous agents that can operate at scale.

Responsibilities

• Build reinforcement learning prototypes that run inside real applications.
• Evolve agents across multiple environments, learning and adapting.
• Create a core layer of AI intelligence for software releases.

Skills

Machine Learning

Deep Reinforcement Learning

Python

PyTorch

Job description

Most research roles publish papers. This one ships the intelligence that makes AI-generated software trustworthy in production. AI is making engineers dramatically more productive. The problem is nobody fully trusts what AI ships.

Why this matters now

AI is rewriting how software gets built. But shipping still breaks on testing. Engineering leaders are desperate to release faster without dropping quality, and they can't get there with manual QA or brittle test automation.

Here's the bigger shift: as AI writes more of the code, the bottleneck moves from generating software to trusting it. Nobody owns that trust layer yet. Duku is building it, autonomous agents that simulate real users, catch critical failures before production, and self-heal as the product evolves.

Backed by experienced operators and investors, we're building what we believe will become a core layer of the modern software stack. We're looking for an exceptional Applied Research Engineer to help invent it. Not someone to apply existing methods. Someone to discover new ones.

Why This Role is Different

Most “AI engineer” jobs are just applying models someone else built. This isn’t that. This is about pushing RL to its edge:

• Agents that think: networks that see and understand apps through vision, structure, and behavior.
• Agents that explore: curiosity-driven RL that uncovers edge cases no human would think of.
• Agents that learn: smarter with every bug, sharper with every correction.
• Agents that scale: millions of states, thousands of sessions, decisions in sub-seconds.

If you’ve ever wanted to take RL out of papers and into the wild, this is it.

What You’ll Achieve

In your first three months, you’ll see your reinforcement learning prototypes running live inside real applications, surfacing bugs no human ever noticed.

By six months, those agents will have evolved, scaling across multiple environments, learning and adapting in ways that prove this isn’t theory but reality.

And within a year, the intelligence you’ve built will sit at the heart of every release for our first customers, powering their ability to ship AI-generated code with confidence.

What You Bring (Non-Negotiables)

• 5+ years shipping ML to production (real systems, not papers).
• Deep RL expertise, you think in Q-values and policy gradients.
• Experience building autonomous agents that actually work at scale.
• Python/PyTorch mastery.

The Stuff That Matters

• You’re obsessed with solving “impossible” problems.
• You’d rather ship and learn than debate in theory.
• You can explain RL to a CEO and optimize it for a GPU cluster.
• You thrive in chaos and see it as opportunity.

Why Join Now

• Impact: You won’t be “joining a team.” You’ll be the team that defines how software is built in the age of AI. Your code won’t sit in a corner, it will become the backbone of a new category.
• Market: Software testing hasn’t changed in 30 years. AI-generated code has rewritten the rules overnight. Whoever solves this bottleneck doesn’t just win a market, they reshape the entire industry.
• Team: Small, elite, no passengers. You’ll be working side by side with a CTO who built this at Meta and a founding team that’s scaled some of the fastest-growing tech companies on the planet.
• Timing: Rarely do technology shifts and career timing line up. This is one of those moments. Five years from now, autonomous QA will be a given. Right now, it’s unsolved and you could be the one who solves it.

The Challenge

Big tech tried to brute‑force this problem and hit a wall. Most startups never got past brittle scripts. The reason is simple: building true autonomy takes more than patching frameworks, it takes intelligence. That’s the path we’re on. Your system will need to:

• Navigate the chaos of modern web apps.
• Learn from sparse, delayed rewards.
• Balance exploration with validation.
• Transfer knowledge across completely different applications.

It won’t be easy. That’s the point.

What You Get

• Equity that actually moves the needle, not token options, but a real ownership stake in what could be the category-defining AI company of the decade.
• Unlimited firepower, the hardware, compute, and resources you need to push RL further than anyone has before.
• A seat at the table, not a cog in the machine, you’ll be in the room where every decision is made, shaping both the product and the company.
• Speed over politics, a London base where execution beats process, every time.
• A shot at legacy, work that will outlive your CV, the kind of achievement you’ll still be talking about 20 years from now.

To win the space, we’re looking for the best people in London, with 10/10 ambition and work ethic to join us and build a product people love.