Research Engineer – AI
About The Position
Primary is building Primary Index, an AI-native ranking system for journalism that evaluates individual journalists on the accuracy, depth, and craft of their published work. The Research Engineer will help design, build, evaluate, and deploy new generations of AI systems for automated knowledge acquisition and evaluation. The work focuses on developing methods that can assess factuality, evidence quality, source reliability, and editorial balance at scale. This is a research-oriented role involving close collaboration with the Chief Scientist on large language models, automated reasoning, knowledge acquisition, and high-throughput AI systems. The engineer will help invent, implement, and evaluate new approaches rather than simply applying existing techniques. Projects include local inference over large text corpora, journalism assessment systems, faithful explanations and justifications, large-scale scoring, open-weight model adaptation and fine-tuning, and methods to evaluate and improve AI systems. AI-assisted software development is expected. The role prioritizes technical judgment, problem solving, independent research, and the ability to take loosely specified problems through research formulation, experimentation, implementation, and critical evaluation. The successful candidate will work in person with an experienced research team in New York City. The company expects work to contribute to rapid production deployment and publication at leading AI conferences.
Requirements
- Strong background in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or computational cognitive systems.
- Ability to independently design and build sophisticated AI systems.
- Excellent analytical and experimental skills.
- Ability to rapidly understand and extend new research.
- Strong technical judgment and intellectual independence.
- Excellent written and spoken communication.
Nice To Haves
- A PhD is desirable but not essential; candidates with an MSc or equivalent experience are encouraged to apply.
- Evidence of independently transforming research ideas into effective AI systems, such as first-author or substantial-contributor research publications, substantial AI research projects, open-source AI software, novel machine learning methods, significant technical contributions to research systems, or the ability to rapidly understand and extend unfamiliar AI systems.
Responsibilities
- Translate high-level research ideas into working AI systems.
- Identify relevant literature and implement or extend state-of-the-art methods.
- Design and carry out experiments to evaluate alternative approaches.
- Develop new algorithms, objectives, and evaluation methods where appropriate.
- Effectively employ and critically evaluate AI-based software development tools.
- Build robust, scalable research prototypes.
- Communicate results clearly through technical reports and research papers.
Benefits
- Generous equity package and meaningful equity grants.
- Annual performance bonus.
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
