R&D Engineer - AI and Innovation

ZoomInfo Technologies LLC • Toronto, ON

1d • Remote

About The Position

The R&D Engineer is a researcher-practitioner responsible for staying close to the frontier of LLM and AI systems research, identifying ideas with practical value, and building POCs that demonstrate feasibility. These POCs are demoed to the team and, where validated, handed off to the Platform and AI Engineers to productionize. This person collaborates closely with the rest of the team throughout the research-to-product pipeline.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience building or evaluating LLM systems — fine-tuning, inference, retrieval, or agents
• Familiarity with RAG architectures beyond naive vector search — HyDE, MMR, graph-based retrieval, reranking, or hybrid search
• Exposure to agent frameworks and multi-agent orchestration patterns (PydanticAI, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar)
• Demonstrated ability to move quickly from idea to working prototype
• A portfolio of explored ideas — published work, technical blog posts, side projects, or OSS contributions
• Strong communication skills — can explain complex research to non-researchers clearly
• Collaborative by default; understands that research value is realized when ideas ship
• Core: Python, agent frameworks (PydanticAI or equivalent), RAG pipeline design (embedding, retrieval, reranking), managed ML platforms (Vertex AI or equivalent)

Nice To Haves

• Systems-level programming experience
• Familiarity with inference infrastructure (vLLM, TensorRT)
• Experience with RLHF or fine-tuning pipelines
• MCP protocol
• Graph databases (Neo4j)

Responsibilities

• Monitor and synthesize developments in LLM systems, AI infrastructure, and adjacent research areas
• Prototype and evaluate novel ideas with a fast feedback loop — build, demo, iterate
• Extend and improve the existing agent and RAG SDKs with new retrieval strategies, agent patterns, and provider integrations
• Evaluate new embedding models, reranking approaches, and retrieval architectures against the existing pipeline
• Collaborate with the Platform and AI Engineers to hand off validated POCs
• Produce clear documentation and demos that make research accessible to non-researchers
• Contribute to discussions with the tech lead on long-term research direction and where to place technical bets
• Engage with the broader research community — conferences, papers, open-source projects
• Identify opportunities where emerging techniques can address real problems surfaced by the AI Engineer

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed