AI Research Engineer Jobs in San Francisco

Capital One is seeking an Applied Researcher to join the AI Foundations team, focusing on LLM Core and Agentic AI. This role involves creating trustworthy and reliable AI systems that enhance customer experiences in banking. You will partner with data scientists, software engineers, and product managers to deliver AI-powered products, leveraging technologies like PyTorch and Hugging Face. The position requires building AI foundation models through all development phases, from design to implementation, and engaging in applied research to push the boundaries of AI for customer-facing applications. You will translate complex technical work into tangible business goals and lead research initiatives that bridge model development with production deployment.

$263k - $300k

Thinking Machines Lab

At Thinking Machines, we build tools that empower individuals to customize AI models for their specific needs, including the ability to train model weights. In this role, you will focus on frontier customization techniques and contribute to developing a leading post-training engine called Tinker. Your work will involve a comprehensive understanding of Reinforcement Learning (RL) science, and your findings will directly influence Tinker's training defaults, API design, and the open-source Tinker Cookbook. You will collaborate with internal research teams and contribute to open science initiatives for external partners.

$350k - $475k

Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines is building AI that extends human will and judgment, with a focus on training frontier models and developing tools that allow users to customize AI for their unique needs. This role leads the Fine-tuning Science team, focusing on frontier customization techniques and the Tinker post-training engine. It's a player-coach position where you will remain hands-on with scientific research while also guiding the team, shaping its direction, and ensuring research findings are integrated into Tinker. You will collaborate with internal research teams, contribute to open science, and engage with external users.

$350k - $475k

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As a Research Engineer on the Synth Data team at SpaceXAI, you will invent and scale the synthetic data that teaches our models new capabilities. You will own the full loop: spotting a capability the model is missing, designing a data generation strategy, building reliable pipelines and verifiers, and validating that the resulting data actually moves the model. You will form hypotheses about what data will help, build the systems to produce it at scale, run ablations, and read the resulting traces and training signals to understand why it worked (or didn’t). Your datasets will go directly into frontier training runs and shape the development of Grok models.

Salary not listed

Genmo is a research lab focused on developing advanced video world models to understand, simulate, and interact with the physical world, aiming to advance physical intelligence and enable robots to learn and act. We are seeking an exceptional Software Engineer to join our research team in pushing the boundaries of visual generative AI. In this role, you will collaborate with experienced researchers to develop and enhance generative models, ensuring their safe and effective deployment. This is an opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge AI research in a fast-paced startup environment.

Salary not listed

AfterQuery

AfterQuery is an applied research lab focused on curating data solutions for foundation model development, serving frontier AI labs with the mission of making expertise widely accessible. This is a unique opportunity to join a rapidly growing company at a pivotal moment in AI. We are backed by leading investors and have a strong founding team with experience from top tech and finance companies. We are seeking exceptional undergraduate and masters students for our AI/ML Research Internship program to work on cutting-edge AI projects in advanced reasoning, computer use, and agentic models. Interns will have access to expert networks and specialized datasets, with opportunities to co-author research papers and present at leading AI conferences.

Salary not listed

OpenAI

We’re hiring a Research Engineer to help OpenAI models solve chip-design problems through reinforcement learning, tool use, and evaluation. You’ll own experiments from the initial idea through implementation and analysis, building environments and evaluations, running training, investigating failures, and using the results to decide what to try next. You’ll also build the software needed to make those experiments reliable and reproducible. We value strong coding fundamentals, careful experimental judgment, and the ability to make progress independently. Prior chip-design experience is helpful, but you can learn the domain alongside the team’s hardware specialists.

$380k - $500k

Abundant

Abundant is building the NVIDIA of training data, recognizing the critical need for scaling data as AI models advance beyond supervised learning to reinforcement learning and learning from experience. The founding team brings extensive experience from leading AI organizations, with a proven track record in deploying deep learning models at scale, training state-of-the-art models, and managing large data pipelines. As a Member of Technical Staff, you will collaborate directly with the founding team to architect the future of model reasoning and intelligence, working at the intersection of research and execution to push the boundaries of AI capabilities.

$120k - $120k

FAR.AI, a non-profit AI research institute dedicated to ensuring advanced AI is safe and beneficial, is seeking a Research Lead to spearhead its pre-training safety initiatives. This role focuses on shaping AI models at their source by controlling capabilities and internal representations, aiming to prevent misuse and reduce loss-of-control risks. The work involves scaling methods for large models, validating approaches like data filtering and gradient routing, and exploring techniques such as unlearning. The Research Lead will direct these efforts, collaborate with red teams for stress-testing, and analyze scalability to frontier systems. This position offers significant autonomy within an impact-driven environment, focusing on empirically grounded, scalable ML safety research.

$290k - $450k

NVIDIA AI for Media is seeking outstanding engineers to join its team, focusing on building and optimizing real-time AI solutions for media and entertainment workflows. This role will involve setting the technical direction for content authenticity AI, architecting model and pipeline strategies for detecting synthetic and manipulated media, and making critical build-vs-adapt decisions. The team works on core technologies to solve ambitious computer vision and deep learning problems, aiming to deliver studio-quality audio and high-resolution video enhancement and effects.

$272k - $431k

Decagon

Decagon is seeking a Research Engineer focused on Audio and Speech to build and productionize models and agent harnesses for real-time voice agents. This role involves advancing multimodal and full-duplex systems capable of natural, real-time listening, reasoning, speaking, and responding. The ideal candidate will own their work end-to-end, ship impactful improvements, and make high-level technical decisions in a collaborative environment.

$200k - $400k

The Institute of Foundation Models is a dedicated research lab focused on building, understanding, using, and risk-managing foundation models. Our mission is to advance research, cultivate future AI builders, and make transformative contributions to a knowledge-driven economy. As part of our team, you will work on the core of cutting-edge foundation model training alongside world-class researchers, data scientists, and engineers. You will tackle fundamental and impactful challenges in AI development, contributing to groundbreaking AI solutions with the potential to reshape industries. Strategic and innovative problem-solving skills are essential for establishing MBZUAI as a global hub for high-performance computing in deep learning and driving impactful discoveries.

$150k - $400k

Decagon

Decagon is seeking a Senior Research Engineer focused on Safety to ensure the reliability and controllability of their AI agents. This role involves identifying real-world failure modes and developing the necessary models, evaluations, and safeguards to prevent them. The ideal candidate will be a strong engineer passionate about advancing applied AI safety in production, taking ownership of their work from end-to-end, and making high-impact technical decisions.

$200k - $400k

OpenAI

OpenAI is seeking a researcher passionate about understanding deep networks, with a strong background in engineering, quantitative reasoning, and the research process. You will develop and carry out a research plan in mechanistic interpretability, in close collaboration with a highly motivated team. You will play a critical role in helping OpenAI ensure future models remain safe even as they grow in capability. This will make a significant impact on our goal of building and deploying safe AGI. The Interpretability team studies internal representations of deep learning models, aiming to understand model behavior and engineer models with more understandable representations, with a particular focus on ensuring the alignment of powerful AI systems.

$295k - $500k