Applied Research Engineer

Department: Applied AI

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

WHO WE ARE

We build Specific Intelligence for the enterprise: agents that continuously learn from a company's processes, data, expertise, and goals. We're building the continual learning layer and platform that captures context, memory, and decision traces across the enterprise, providing an environment where specialized agents learn how to do real work.

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 to create new product experiences. Our applied research engineers sit 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.

Our Team: We are 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 other teams. We work with F50 customers, and we’re fortunate to be backed by Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, Greenoaks, and others.

Who Thrives Here: We're looking for people who are excited about applying novel research and complex systems to real-world problems. You should be comfortable navigating unfamiliar environments quickly, whether that's a new codebase, a new customer's data architecture, or a problem domain you've never seen before. 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.

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

BENEFITS + LOGISTICS

This role is based in San Francisco. We work in-person at our office in the Design District.

We offer competitive compensation and equity, generous health benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, daily lunches and dinners, transportation, retirement plans, and relocation support. 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.