Research Engineer
Research Engineers at these organizations work across the full stack—from implementing cutting-edge algorithms and optimizing models for specialized hardware, to building scalable infrastructure that translates research prototypes into production systems. They combine deep machine learning expertise with strong software engineering skills, often bridging gaps between research scientists and infrastructure teams to accelerate progress on frontier AI problems like inference optimization, reinforcement learning for robotics and reasoning, multimodal generation, and agentic systems. These roles typically sit within research teams that collaborate closely with product and infrastructure groups, requiring engineers to balance scientific rigor with practical engineering constraints while contributing to publications and deployments that advance the field.
Measured across 103 of 104 open postings.
This role is advertised at 3 levels, so a single figure for the role would describe none of them. Experience and pay are the midpoints for each level on its own.
| Level | Share | Median years | Median pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid | 66%(68) | 4 | $370k |
| Senior | 17%(17) | — | — |
| Staff / Principal | 13%(13) | — | — |
A dash means too few postings stated it to report a midpoint. Most companies do not publish a salary band, so pay is indicative rather than a market rate. 2 levels with fewer than 10 open postings are not shown.
“Collaborate with AI and data scientists to tightly integrate the autonomous lab with AI models for analysis and planning of experiments.”
“design of complex agents, quantitative experiments with prompting, constructing model benchmarks, synthetic data generation, or model finetuning”
“OpenAI models solve chip-design problems through reinforcement learning, tool use, and evaluation”
“develop and deploy AI models that accelerate the identification and development of novel therapeutics”
Requirements are a share of every open posting, so a role missing from this list is one where almost nobody asks. Work mode is different: many postings never say, so that figure counts only the ones that do. A posting stops being advertised when it is filled, cancelled or reorganised, so read the last figure as how long these stay on the market, not as time to hire.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
ML systems development
Large-scale model training
Research-to-production translation
Research experiment design
Model architecture design
Post-training and alignment methods
Distributed systems architecture
Data pipeline engineering
Training data curation
Systems performance optimization
AI evaluation design
Agentic system research
Inference performance optimization
Frontier AI research
Computer vision and perception
AI red teaming and safety testing
AI for scientific discovery
Research rigor and reproducibility
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
104 open Research Engineer jobs across 43 companies.
Other Research & Science roles
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