Research Engineer, Applied AI Engineering

OuterSignal•New York, NY

23h•$200,000 - $300,000

About The Position

This is a backend-focused software engineering role specializing in applying ML/AI to user-facing products. You will work on the systems that power OuterSignal’s AI/data pipeline: prompt chaining, eval design, research APIs, model routing, and prod orchestration. The evolution of this role will include inference serving, fine-tuning, and synthetic dataset generation.

Requirements

A strong engineer who can reason through distributed systems, data pipelines, databases, and are comfortable working across varying programming languages.
Extremely AI-fluent and actively use modern AI tools to move faster.
Strong first-principles thinking and can turn ambiguous problems into hypotheses, experiments, and shipped systems.
Good judgment and taste: you simplify aggressively, avoid unnecessary complexity, and care about maintainability.
Care about measurement. You do not trust vibes when evals, tests, traces, or data can tell you what is actually happening.

Nice To Haves

Experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face, vLLM, Ray, MLflow, RAG, fine-tuning & RL, inference serving, and/or model evaluation systems.

Responsibilities

Build and improve production AI/data pipelines that run across LLMs, APIs, databases, and workflow systems like Temporal, Postgres, ClickHouse, and Kubernetes.
Design evals and build Jupyter notebooks that help us measure model behavior, data quality, extraction accuracy, and end-to-end customer impact.
Build observability into AI workflows so we can understand cost, latency, reliability, and quality.
Experiment with new models, retrieval strategies, structured-output techniques, prompt/program architectures, and model-routing approaches.
Integrate with fast-changing research and AI APIs, understand their behavior deeply, and build robust abstractions around them.
Help define the foundation for future inference serving, fine-tuning, dataset generation, and model evaluation infrastructure.