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.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Designing and implementing machine learning model architectures and training pipelines
Writing production-quality code with strong software engineering practices
Conducting scientific experiments and analyzing results to advance ML understanding
Optimizing model performance for efficiency, latency, and throughput
Designing and implementing evaluation frameworks and benchmarks
Building scalable distributed systems and infrastructure for large-scale training
Debugging complex systems and diagnosing root causes of performance issues
Working across full-stack systems from hardware optimization to high-level model design
Developing reinforcement learning algorithms and training systems
Conducting dataset curation and bias analysis for improved model generalization
Implementing computer vision and perception algorithms for specialized domains
Building agentic systems that autonomously reason and interact with external environments
Applying generative models and diffusion-based approaches to novel problem domains
Implementing post-training optimization techniques such as quantization and pruning
Interpreting and understanding internal representations of large language models
Designing safety evaluation systems and detection mechanisms for model misuse
Collaborating with cross-functional teams including researchers, engineers, and product managers
Communicating technical findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
Scoping research problems and managing project execution from conception to deployment
Identifying and prioritizing high-impact research directions and bottlenecks
Rapid prototyping and iteration to validate research hypotheses
Mentoring junior engineers and leading complex technical projects
Pair programming and knowledge sharing with team members
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
103 open Research Engineer jobs across 39 companies.
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