Applied Research Engineer
At a glance
Mid-level AI Research role at Applied Compute. San Francisco · full-time · $200,000–$320,000 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Take customer work from discovery through delivery, learning their data, workflows, and problems before building and launching agents
- Train and post-train enterprise models, including designing their environments and carrying them through deployment
- Work with customer technical and business teams while adapting to unfamiliar architectures, data systems, and requirements
- Bring customer discoveries into improvements to general agents and collaborate on architectures, evaluation methods, and best practices
What you bring
- Meaningful AI research experience from industry or academic work
- Comfort working in unfamiliar code and training models on messy, real-world data
- Strong problem-solving in unclear, fast-changing situations, plus the ability to understand customer organizations through direct conversations
Who this fits
This role suits an applied researcher who wants hands-on customer work and ownership from problem discovery through deployment. The position is based in San Francisco, with work from the Mission office. Visa sponsorship is available.
From the employer
The role
As an applied research engineer, you’ll own customer engagements end-to-end: understanding their data, their workflows, and their problems, then building and deploying agents that deliver real value. For our largest customers, you'll train custom models tailored to their specific needs. For others, you'll take what you learn and bring it back to improve our general agents.
What you'll do
Train and post-train models for enterprises, from environment design through deployment
Own engagements end-to-end, working directly with technical and business stakeholders
Navigate new customer architectures, data systems, and requirements quickly
Surface learnings from customers and contribute them back to our platform
Collaborate across research, product, and infrastructure to define architectures, evaluation frameworks, and best practices
What we're looking for
Meaningful AI research experience, either in industry or academic work
Comfort diving into unfamiliar codebases and training models on real-world, messy data
Strong problem-solving skills, especially in ambiguous, fast-changing environments
Ability to work directly with customers: listening, empathizing, and understanding how their organizations operate
Desire to own problems end-to-end and deliver outcomes
Strong candidates also have
Experience training or fine-tuning language models in production settings
Background building RL environments, evaluation frameworks, or agent systems
Previous experience as a founder or early engineer at a zero-to-one company
Technical creativity through side projects, open source contributions, or published work
Experience at companies with forward-deployed or customer-facing engineering cultures
The U.S. base salary range for this full-time position is $200,000–$320,000. Total compensation for this role also includes meaningful equity in a fast-growing startup, along with a comprehensive benefits package designed to support you both personally and professionally. Base salary is determined by a range of factors including individual qualifications, experience, skills, interview performance, market data, and work location. The listed salary range is intended as a guideline and may be adjusted.
About us
Applied Compute builds Specific Intelligence for the enterprise. We provide the continual learning infrastructure for companies to build agent workforces trained on proprietary data and institutional expertise. Our researchers and platform embed directly within customer environments to build custom evals, train models, and deploy agents that get better with use.
Why we’re excited: We get to work at a rare intersection. Our product team builds the platform powering a new generation of digital coworkers. Our research team pushes the frontier of post-training and reinforcement learning. Our applied AI team sits side-by-side with customers as they ship agents into production. This combination of strong product, deep research, and boots on the ground is what we believe it takes to bring AI to the enterprise. We are product-led, research-enabled, and forward-deployed.
Who we are: We’re a team of engineers, researchers, and operators. Many of us are former founders. We've built RL infrastructure at OpenAI, data foundations at Scale AI, and systems at Together, Two Sigma, Watershed, and others. We work with F50 customers and are fortunate to be backed by partners like Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, and Greenoaks.
Who Thrives Here: We're looking for people who are excited about applying novel research and complex systems to real-world problems. Our team genuinely enjoys working with customers: listening, empathizing, and understanding how work actually gets done in their organizations. Former founders, people who've built a lot of side projects, or anyone who's shown they can own something end-to-end, tend to do well here.
Benefits & Logistics
This role is based in San Francisco. We work from our office in the Mission. We offer:
Competitive compensation and equity
100% employer-paid health insurance coverage for you and your family
Unlimited PTO
Paid parental leave
Daily lunches and dinners
Transportation and relocation support
5% 401k match
We sponsor visas. While we can't guarantee success for every candidate or role, if you're the right fit, we're committed to working through the process with you. We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. As set forth in Applied Compute’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.