Forward Deployed Research Engineer

FORWARD DEPLOYED RESEARCH ENGINEER

Location: Remote—United States Employment Type: Full-time Salary: $100,000–$200,000 per year Schedule: Approximately 70–80% working-hour overlap with San Francisco or Singapore Visa/Relocation Support: Available for exceptional candidates

ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY

Kadir.ai is recruiting a Forward Deployed Research Engineer on behalf of a fast-growing artificial intelligence company developing reinforcement-learning training data, evaluations, and infrastructure for frontier AI agents.

This is a hands-on engineering position for someone who enjoys solving ambiguous, time-sensitive technical problems. You will work across AI evaluations, software, data pipelines, deployment environments, and customer delivery.

This is not a traditional implementation-consulting role. The successful candidate will combine strong technical judgment, practical debugging skills, and the ability to independently deliver solutions for technical customers and data partners.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own technical deployment requests from initial triage through completion
• Clarify ambiguous customer requirements and identify the underlying technical problem
• Troubleshoot issues involving evaluation environments, datasets, configurations, code, and agent behavior
• Build scripts, tools, and specialized pipelines for urgent customer and partner requirements
• Clean, transform, validate, and analyze complex datasets
• Develop and improve benchmarks and evaluations for AI agents
• Evaluate task realism, rubric reliability, environment usability, and trajectory quality
• Debug problems across Python applications, Docker containers, Linux environments, and data pipelines
• Work directly with technical customers, subject-matter experts, and data vendors
• Coordinate with research, engineering, operations, and go-to-market teams
• Balance delivery speed with quality, correctness, security, and reliability
• Convert recurring manual processes into scalable tools and automated workflows
• Document technical findings, risks, procedures, and recommended solutions
• Communicate project status and technical issues clearly to stakeholders

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Strong proficiency in Python
• Hands-on experience with Docker and Linux
• Experience with AI or machine-learning evaluations and benchmarks
• Experience developing data-processing, validation, or evaluation pipelines
• Strong debugging skills across software, data, and execution environments
• Understanding of evaluation quality, task design, scoring, rubrics, and failure analysis
• Ability to work independently in ambiguous and rapidly changing situations
• Strong technical judgment and first-principles problem-solving skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication abilities
• Experience collaborating with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Ability to maintain approximately 70–80% working-hour overlap with San Francisco or Singapore

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience in applied AI, research engineering, or forward-deployed engineering
• Experience building or maintaining reinforcement-learning environments
• Familiarity with AI agents, trajectories, graders, reward signals, and evaluation frameworks
• Experience supporting technical customers or urgent production deployments
• Experience working with frontier models or post-training workflows
• Experience cleaning and validating large or complex datasets
• Experience creating internal tools and automating recurring workflows
• Early-stage startup experience
• Published research, technical blogs, open-source contributions, or independent AI projects
• Experience collaborating with distributed teams across multiple time zones

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related discipline is preferred
• A master’s degree or relevant research experience is beneficial but not required
• Equivalent professional experience, independent technical work, or a strong project portfolio will be considered
• Technical ability, learning speed, judgment, and ownership matter more than a fixed number of years of experience

WHAT THE ROLE OFFERS

• Opportunity to work on technically challenging AI-evaluation and reinforcement-learning problems
• Direct collaboration with research teams, technical customers, and data partners
• Significant ownership over projects and technical delivery
• Remote work with substantial overlap with San Francisco or Singapore
• Competitive annual compensation of $100,000–$200,000
• Potential relocation and visa support for exceptional candidates

HIRING PROCESS

• Application and résumé review
• Initial screening discussion
• Two technical interviews
• Two-to-three-day structured work trial
• Final decision and offer

Kadir.ai is an equal opportunity recruiting partner. Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law.

Pay: $100,000.00 - $200,000.00 per year

Work Location: Remote