Founding Applied Research Engineer

Rox Data Corp•San Francisco, CA

5d•Onsite

About The Position

Rox is building the AI-native revenue operating system. Most enterprise software was built for humans operating dashboards. Rox is built for agents operating systems. Instead of static workflows, Rox runs continuous decision loops powered by real-time context from across the enterprise. Agents analyze signals, reason about them, and take action — automatically. To make that possible, we are building infrastructure that combines: Distributed systems, Real-time decisioning, Agent execution frameworks, Semantic retrieval systems, Low-latency streaming infrastructure, Knowledge graph architectures. We're backed by Sequoia, GV, and General Catalyst and have grown rapidly from 15 to 75 people while shipping our platform years faster than the market expected. We already support Global 2000 customers across banking, hardware, construction, and sovereign AI. We are building for what enterprise AI systems will require two years from now — not just what exists today.

Requirements

You have spent real time thinking about how agents fail in practice, not just how they perform on benchmarks
You have built evaluation systems and know exactly where the standard approaches break down
You can write code well enough to implement your own ideas and run your own experiments — and ship things that make it into production
You move fast. Research at Rox is not slow. The environment changes monthly and the team ships continuously.
You are more interested in problems that matter than problems that are easy to publish
A PhD is not required. Strong research instincts and the ability to ship are.

Nice To Haves

Agent evaluation and behavioral benchmarking
Retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, and knowledge graph systems
RL applied to real-world agent behavior
Production ML systems — latency, reliability, observability
Data pipeline and agent orchestration infrastructure
Post-training, fine-tuning, and model adaptation for production use cases

Responsibilities

Design and run research programs directly tied to production agent problems
Build evaluation frameworks that measure what actually matters in live systems
Work on agent memory, retrieval, and context systems alongside the Core and Platform Eng teams
Translate research findings into infrastructure improvements with measurable production impact
Help define Rox's long-term research agenda as we scale
Collaborate closely with engineering leads who have built at the frontier — our team includes IMO, IOI, and ICPC medalists, and researchers from DeepMind, OpenAI, and top academic labs