AI Research Engineer Jobs in San Francisco

Sierra

Sierra is seeking an Applied Research Intern to join their team focused on improving the performance, speed, and cost-efficiency of AI agents. This internship offers a unique opportunity to work on a research project from conception to potential publication, with the guidance of a mentor. The intern will tackle real-world AI agent challenges, conduct rigorous experiments, and contribute to advancements in agent evaluation, reasoning, and post-training methods. The role is ideal for individuals passionate about making AI agents more reliable and effective, with the potential for their research to impact millions of users.

Salary not listed

Perplexity AI

Perplexity is seeking energetic researchers and engineers to join its Secure Intelligence Institute (SII), a flagship research center focused on advancing security, privacy, and trust in frontier intelligence. The SII aims to push the boundaries of AI security research, implement these advancements into Perplexity's systems, and share knowledge to benefit the wider AI ecosystem. As a member of SII, you will conduct original and impactful research to enhance the security and privacy of frontier intelligence systems. Your work should be both theoretically rigorous and practically applicable to improving the systems used by millions daily. You will leverage insights from operating large-scale AI systems and translate research findings, both internal and external, into practical improvements that safeguard Perplexity's users.

$220k - $405k

The RL infrastructure team is looking for an engineer to help develop our RL training framework. This role involves designing and implementing the systems that support all RL workloads at SpaceXSI, from small-scale experiments to production training runs. You will be responsible for profiling, debugging, and optimizing the end-to-end training performance, as well as improving the scalability and observability of the RL stack.

$180k - $440k

Liquid AI, a company spun out of MIT CSAIL, is developing general-purpose AI systems designed for efficient deployment across various targets, from data centers to on-device hardware. They focus on low latency, minimal memory usage, privacy, and reliability, partnering with enterprises in consumer electronics, automotive, life sciences, and financial services. The Pre-Training Data team is central to this mission, responsible for sourcing, filtering, synthesizing, and mixing data that will be used to train Liquid Foundation Models. As public data sources become less effective, the quality of models increasingly relies on purpose-built datasets and understanding the impact of data changes on model performance. This role treats data as a research problem, requiring close collaboration with pre-training researchers to run experiments, answer data-related questions, and build pipelines that feed into training runs.

Salary not listed

NVIDIA is seeking a senior or principal engineer to join the Generalist Embodied Agent Research (GEAR) group, focusing on physics simulation for Project GR00T, an initiative to build foundation models and full-stack technology for humanoid robots. You will collaborate with a research team known for influential work in multimodal foundation models, large-scale robot learning, embodied AI, and physical simulation, contributing to impactful research projects and product roadmaps.

$224k - $357k

SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack, from supercomputers to Grok models and a suite of applications. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next. The RL infrastructure team is looking for an engineer to help with low precision RL training and inference.

$180k - $440k

NVIDIA is seeking top research engineers for its Autonomous Vehicles Research team. This role focuses on AI models for autonomous driving, including agent behavior, end-to-end architectures, AI safety, closed-loop training, and AV foundation models. You will conduct fundamental, publishable research while also impacting products and collaborating with teams across various AI applications. The position offers a collaborative and nurturing research environment.

$184k - $357k

SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack: from our Colossus supercomputers, to Grok models, to our suite of applications, including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next.

$180k - $440k

NVIDIA is seeking a world-class researcher in generative AI to join our research team. You will conduct original research for generative AI applications, including image, video, 3D, and audio generation. The role involves working with a team of researchers to make significant impacts with generative AI models, building research prototypes, and scaling them with large datasets and compute. After demonstrating the promise of your research, you will collaborate with product teams to integrate your ideas into products.

$192k - $357k

NVIDIA is seeking world-class deep learning researchers to build the next generation of AI for graphics and gaming. This role focuses on step-change research that delivers undeniable user experience improvements, driving fundamental AI research into products used by millions. You will conduct cutting-edge research, train advanced models, prototype in real-time engines, and collaborate with product, driver, and hardware teams to bring innovative ideas to market. If you are passionate about deep learning, real-time graphics, and delivering transformative technology directly into games and graphics applications, this is an excellent opportunity.

$168k - $265k

NVIDIA Research is seeking a world-class generative AI researcher to join its fundamental generative AI research team. The team focuses on advancing generative AI methods for scientific applications, including biomolecular design (small molecule, protein, and RNA design), with the goal of creating research that pushes boundaries and has a real-world impact. This role offers the freedom and bandwidth to conduct groundbreaking research within a collaborative team that consistently publishes at top venues in machine learning and AI for science.

$192k - $305k

NVIDIA is seeking an outstanding research scientist to build humanoid robot foundation models and systems within the Generalist Embodied Agent Research (GEAR) group. The mission is to create general-purpose embodied agents capable of exploring and mastering complex skills in both virtual and physical environments. You will collaborate with a research team known for influential work in multimodal foundation models, large-scale robot learning, game AI, and physical simulation, contributing to significant research projects and product roadmaps, including milestones like Project GR00T, a foundation model for humanoid robots.

$192k - $357k

NVIDIA is seeking a senior or principal engineer to join the Generalist Embodied Agent Research (GEAR) group, focusing on robotics systems. This role is central to Project GR00T, an initiative to build foundation models and full-stack technology for humanoid robots. You will collaborate with a research team known for its influential work in multimodal foundation models, large-scale robot learning, embodied AI, and physics simulation, contributing to impactful research projects and product roadmaps.

$184k - $357k

NVIDIA is seeking a Senior Scientist to advance synthetic data generation for training frontier models. You will contribute to open-source libraries within the NVIDIA NeMo ecosystem, creating synthetic datasets across text, code, structured, and multimodal data to enhance LLM pre- and post-training. This role blends hands-on software engineering with applied research in generative methods, requiring collaboration with research, engineering, product, and model teams, as well as external labs. The position emphasizes driving software excellence through modern tooling and professional Git/CI-CD practices, and publishing original research to maintain technical leadership.

$168k - $305k

NVIDIA is seeking a Senior Research Scientist to conduct groundbreaking research at the intersection of AI, GPU computing, and Electronic Design Automation (EDA). This role offers the opportunity to shape the future of chip design through AI and GPU acceleration. You will define and conduct original research across EDA algorithms, VLSI design methodology, and advanced machine learning techniques, innovating in EDA software and algorithms with applications spanning supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, as well as GPU-accelerated optimization methods. Collaboration with cross-functional teams, the global research community through publications and presentations, and external researchers will be key to translating research into real-world product impact and driving thought leadership.

$192k - $357k

NVIDIA Research is seeking a PhD researcher to conduct groundbreaking research at the intersection of AI, GPU computing, and Electronic Design Automation (EDA). This role offers the opportunity to shape the future of chip design, which is being transformed by deep learning and GPU acceleration. We are looking for creative and collaborative individuals interested in tackling new challenges and contributing to a world-class technology employer.

$168k - $265k

NVIDIA is seeking research interns with a strong background in applying modern AI methods to re-imagine technology across Earth System Simulation and Analytics. This role involves research on applied topics such as generative data assimilation, hybrid climate simulation, full model emulation of climate model components, regional-to-global high-resolution AI autoregressive weather prediction, and dynamical downscaling. We are looking for creative, independent, and self-starting individuals to help invent the future of AI in climate science. The ideal candidate will have strong computer science skills with knowledge of physical domain sciences, or strong domain science skills with sufficient technical expertise. Join a diverse research group that tackles challenging interdisciplinary problems, publishes at top venues, and drives real impact on NVIDIA products and global climate prediction.

$0k - $0k

NVIDIA is seeking a Reinforcement Learning Engineer to join its mission in building intelligent, safe, and efficient self-driving technology. This role involves pushing the boundaries of autonomous vehicle decision-making and planning by leveraging Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). As a world leader in AI and high-performance computing, NVIDIA offers a unique platform where innovative research meets real-world production, aiming to redefine transportation globally.

$224k - $357k

NVIDIA is seeking a Principal Scientist to lead the technical direction for synthetic data generation across its frontier model initiatives. This role involves defining and building open-source libraries within the NVIDIA NeMo ecosystem to create synthetic datasets for text, code, structured, and multimodal data. These datasets will be crucial for the pre- and post-training of large language models like Nemotron. The position blends hands-on software engineering with applied research in generative methods, requiring collaboration with various internal teams and external research labs.

$272k - $431k

Join our groundbreaking research team as we revolutionize the future of physical AI through advanced generative models. As a Research Scientist specializing in Generative AI for Physical AI, you will be at the forefront of developing next-generation algorithms that bridge the gap between virtual and physical realms. You will work with state-of-the-art technology and have access to massive computational resources to bring your ideas to life, shaping the future of AI where digital intelligence meets physical reality.

$168k - $265k

NVIDIA Research is seeking a world-class generative AI researcher to join its fundamental generative AI research team. The team focuses on advancing generative AI methods for scientific applications, including biomolecular design (small molecule, protein, and RNA design). The role involves fundamental research with the freedom to conduct ground-breaking work, aiming to push the boundaries of generative models and create real-world impact. Researchers will collaborate with a talented team that consistently publishes at top venues in machine learning and AI for science.

$168k - $265k

NVIDIA's Autonomous Systems and Physical AI Research (ASPIRE) group is seeking top Research Scientists to advance the field of intelligent machines for autonomous vehicles, robotics, and physical AI. This role focuses on fundamental research challenges, including developing new training paradigms, ensuring safety and reliability in critical applications, enabling navigation in novel environments, and building systems that reason and interact safely with humans and other agents. Researchers are encouraged to publish their work and contribute to open-source projects, collaborating with internal product teams and external researchers to influence real-world products while pursuing groundbreaking research.

$168k - $265k

NVIDIA is seeking Senior Deep Learning Scientists to advance their work in streaming and agentic multimodal AI. This role involves developing models capable of reasoning, planning, and acting across diverse modalities, with a focus on defining core algorithmic improvements for multimodal foundation models. You will contribute to high-impact, large language models and multimodal AI products that enhance user experiences, working within the Nemotron LLM team to solve real-world agentic AI challenges.

$184k - $288k

NVIDIA is developing advanced foundation models and generative AI systems for Physical AI applications, including robotics, autonomous driving, smart spaces, and embodied agents. The NVIDIA Cosmos Platform facilitates multimodal world understanding, simulation, synthetic data generation, and embodied reasoning. We are seeking talented PhD interns to contribute to the advancement of Physical AI and world models.

$0k - $0k