AI Research Engineer Jobs at Startups

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

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

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

Harvey is transforming legal and professional services by combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise. This role is an opportunity to join a fast-scaling company at an inflection point, defining a new category in real-time. The team operates with intensity, ownership, and a commitment to excellence, guided by values of Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished. We are looking for driven individuals to do the best work of their careers alongside like-minded colleagues.

$230k - $340k

Snorkel AI

Snorkel AI is seeking a Research Fellow to build open benchmarks and evaluation environments that help shape how AI progress is measured. This fellowship is designed for PhD students and postdocs who wish to translate significant research questions into novel AI evaluation methods. The fellow will lead projects from inception to public release, with guidance from a Snorkel researcher and access to company resources, including domain experts and compute power. This role involves a hybrid work arrangement, with at least one day per week spent with Snorkel's research team in San Francisco or New York offices.

$85k - $165k

Dscout

Dscout is seeking an AI Research Engineer to join their new AI Training & Evals unit. This team focuses on building human data and evaluations to determine if AI performs effectively for real people in real-world contexts. While AI models may excel at benchmarks, they often surprise users in practice. This role bridges that gap by leveraging Dscout's decade of experience in capturing human behavior to create training data, evaluations, and benchmarks that AI teams can trust. The position offers a unique opportunity to work on unsolved problems in AI measurement, study real participants in their own context, and contribute to publishing novel methods and benchmarks.

$250k - $400k

Snorkel AI

Snorkel AI is seeking a Research Scientist to advance the creation of high-quality data and environments for AI agents. You will build and optimize pipelines that integrate real-world data, automated generation, and human expert input. Collaborating with domain experts, academic partners, customers, and internal teams, you will scale these pipelines to address frontier model performance gaps and enhance data and environment diversity. Your work will empower human knowledge and judgment, enabling experts to refine data and agentic environments, solidifying Snorkel's position as a leader in frontier data solutions. This role is perfect for individuals passionate about advancing frontier AI through data and environment creation, and who enjoy translating research into scalable, reusable systems.

$200k - $375k

Snorkel AI

Snorkel AI is seeking a Research Scientist to bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and real-world AI systems. This hands-on role involves prototyping, building, and deploying innovative AI solutions, translating research breakthroughs into scalable, practical applications. The company operates in a fast-paced, high-impact environment, seeking individuals who thrive on rapid iteration, solving open-ended challenges, and driving innovation from research into production.

$200k - $375k

Snorkel AI

Snorkel AI is seeking Forward Deployed Researchers to partner with frontier AI labs on challenging data problems. This customer-facing role requires deep technical and research expertise to help design complex data and environments that enhance frontier model performance. You will act as a thought partner, working at the intersection of research, technical strategy, and customer collaboration. Your responsibilities will include scoping training data needs, designing RL environments, developing evaluation frameworks, analyzing model behavior, and translating customer objectives into technical plans.

$160k - $400k

As a multimodal engineer on the Imagine Model Team, you will develop cutting-edge AI experiences beyond text, with a strong focus on enabling high-fidelity understanding and generation across image and video modalities, while also incorporating audio where it enhances visual content. Responsibilities span data curation, modeling, training, inference serving, and product integration, covering both pretraining and post-training phases. You will collaborate closely with product teams to push model frontiers and deliver exceptional end-to-end user experiences.

$180k - $440k

Raindrop

Raindrop is seeking a founding Research Engineer to investigate the behavior of AI agents in production environments. This role is crucial for an early-stage team, involving setting the research direction, conducting experiments, and disseminating findings through publications. The focus will be on understanding agent failures, advancing simulation techniques, developing novel detection methods for undefined issues, and exploring high-impact open questions in AI agent behavior. The ideal candidate will possess strong communication skills, a passion for sharing research, deep expertise in areas like interpretability or AI safety, and the ability to prototype and ship experiments.

Salary not listed

Trajectory Labs is seeking researchers to design evaluations for conceptual reasoning in AI safety, focusing on complex, open-ended problems in AI governance, alignment, macrostrategy, and economics. These evaluations will be paired with rubrics to distinguish genuine reasoning from superficial responses. The role involves working 20-40+ hours per week, either remotely or on-site in Berkeley. As an early-stage startup, responsibilities and priorities may evolve rapidly. The company's mission is to automate AI safety work through AI models, building safety and alignment evaluations, red-teaming programs, and RL environments for leading AI labs.

$0k - $0k

We are building AI that changes how people capture, understand, and act on conversations and meetings. As Director of AI Research, you will lead research and development across automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification (SID), large language models (LLMs), and audio language models. Your work will shape our AI capabilities, product direction, and long-term research strategy. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who combines research depth with experience building and deploying AI systems at scale. You will set technical priorities, guide model and infrastructure decisions, and work directly with the team on challenging research and engineering problems. Partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and Data teams, you will turn research advances into reliable product capabilities. You will also build the team, experimentation practices, and technical foundation needed to move quickly while maintaining high standards for quality and performance.

$244k - $313k

Turing

Turing is seeking exceptional Research Scientists to join our research organization and develop new ways to evaluate, train, and improve frontier AI systems. This is a research-first role focused on problems where the right benchmark, dataset, or methodology often does not yet exist. You will identify important gaps in the literature, propose ambitious new research directions, and take projects from initial hypothesis through experimentation, benchmark construction, and publication. Our research is deliberately focused on frontier evaluation, synthetic data, hallucination and reliability, and agentic science. We are looking for scientists who can recognize important problems early, formulate them precisely, and design rigorous research programs to answer them.

$250k - $400k

Turing

Turing is seeking Research Engineers to advance our understanding of frontier AI systems and develop practical innovations in data, algorithms, evaluation, and training. You will work at the intersection of research and engineering, investigating high-impact questions that improve real-world AI systems. You will design and run rigorous experiments, develop research-grade prototypes and tooling, and collaborate with Research, Engineering, Product, and Operations teams to translate promising ideas into scalable applications. This role offers the opportunity to contribute to both foundational research and applied AI development across synthetic and agentic data generation, reinforcement learning, post-training, model understanding, benchmarks, and evaluation.

$250k - $400k

Turing

Turing is seeking Research Engineers to advance the understanding of frontier AI systems and develop practical innovations in data, algorithms, evaluation, and training. You will work at the intersection of research and engineering, investigating high-impact questions that improve real-world AI systems. You will design and run rigorous experiments, develop research-grade prototypes and tooling, and collaborate with Research, Engineering, Product, and Operations teams to translate promising ideas into scalable applications. This role offers the opportunity to contribute to both foundational research and applied AI development across synthetic and agentic data generation, reinforcement learning, post-training, model understanding, benchmarks, and evaluation.

$250k - $400k

Turing

Turing is at the forefront of accelerating superintelligence to drive economic progress. We partner with leading AI labs and enterprises to create high-quality datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and research benchmarks that enhance model capabilities in areas like software engineering, enterprise knowledge work, and advanced STEM reasoning. Our work spans both foundational research and applied AI development, focusing on synthetic and agentic data generation, reinforcement learning, post-training, model understanding, benchmarks, and evaluation. We aim to bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and real-world deployment, using deployment signals to refine data, evaluations, and models.

$250k - $400k

Turing

Turing is seeking exceptional Research Scientists to join our STEM research organization and develop new ways to evaluate, train, and improve frontier AI systems. This is a research-first role focused on problems where the right benchmark, dataset, or methodology often does not yet exist. You will identify important gaps in the literature, propose ambitious new research directions, and take projects from initial hypothesis through experimentation, benchmark construction, and publication. Our research is deliberately focused on frontier STEM evaluation, synthetic data, hallucination and reliability, and agentic science. We are looking for scientists who can recognize important problems early, formulate them precisely, and design rigorous research programs to answer them.

$250k - $350k

Turing

Turing builds large-scale datasets and reinforcement learning (RL) environments that power post-training for leading AI labs and enterprises. We create RL environments to evaluate and improve models on complex, long-range, multi-step workflows across high-value domains. We are seeking Research Engineers to advance our understanding of frontier AI systems and develop practical innovations in data, algorithms, evaluation, and training. You will work at the intersection of research and engineering, investigating high-impact questions that improve real-world AI systems. You will design and run rigorous experiments, develop research-grade prototypes and tooling, and collaborate with teams to translate promising ideas into scalable applications. This role offers the opportunity to contribute to both foundational research and applied AI development across synthetic and agentic data generation, reinforcement learning, post-training, model understanding, benchmarks, and evaluation.

$250k - $350k

Turing

Turing is seeking Research Engineers to advance our understanding of frontier AI systems and develop practical innovations in data, algorithms, evaluation, and training. You will work at the intersection of research and engineering, investigating high-impact questions that improve real-world AI systems. You will design and run rigorous experiments, develop research-grade prototypes and tooling, and collaborate with Research, Engineering, Product, and Operations teams to translate promising ideas into scalable applications. This role offers the opportunity to contribute to both foundational research and applied AI development across synthetic and agentic data generation, reinforcement learning, post-training, model understanding, benchmarks, and evaluation.

$250k - $350k

Turing

Turing is seeking Research Engineers to advance our understanding of frontier AI systems and develop practical innovations in data, algorithms, evaluation, and training. You will work at the intersection of research and engineering, investigating high-impact questions that improve real-world AI systems. You will design and run rigorous experiments, develop research-grade prototypes and tooling, and collaborate with Research, Engineering, Product, and Operations teams to translate promising ideas into scalable applications. This role offers the opportunity to contribute to both foundational research and applied AI development across synthetic and agentic data generation, reinforcement learning, post-training, model understanding, benchmarks, and evaluation.

$250k - $350k

Turing

Turing is seeking exceptional AI Research Scientists to join our STEM research organization and develop new ways to evaluate, train, and improve frontier AI systems. This is a research-first role focused on problems where the right benchmark, dataset, or methodology often does not yet exist. You will identify important gaps in the literature, propose ambitious new research directions, and take projects from initial hypothesis through experimentation, benchmark construction, and publication. Our research is deliberately focused on frontier STEM evaluation, synthetic data, hallucination and reliability, and agentic science. We are looking for scientists who can recognize important problems early, formulate them precisely, and design rigorous research programs to answer them.

$150k - $300k