Research Engineer

Outset

. Own evaluation infrastructure for testing competing modeling approaches .

Posted 10/22/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • United StatesMid-LevelSenior💰 $200,000 - $240,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in building and maintaining large-scale data pipelines, with a strong foundation in Python and cloud infrastructure. Capable of translating scientific requirements into reproducible code while ensuring evaluation validity and cost efficiency.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Python ProgrammingLarge-Scale Data Pipeline EngineeringCloud Infrastructure ExperienceMachine Learning UnderstandingDeterministic and Reproducible Coding

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Software EngineeringSQLGit-Based WorkflowsExperiment Design TranslationModel APIsFine-TuningCost MonitoringData ManagementCode ReviewDocumentation

Tools & Technologies

Agentic Coding ToolsMulti-GPU HardwareVLLMSGLangEvaluation Infrastructure

Industry Keywords

Human Behavior DataEvaluation ValidityResearch Code SynchronizationCompute and API Spend TrackingSurvey DataDigital TwinsGenerative Agents

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudPythonSQL

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own evaluation infrastructure for testing competing modeling approaches
Implement measurement pipelines with deterministic and traceable outputs
Maintain versioned evaluation datasets with held-out sets excluded from training
Build and maintain data pipelines for human-participant, external, and model training data
Link records belonging to the same participant across sources
Keep research code synchronized with the production product
Detect and prevent threats to evaluation validity
Track compute and API spend and production-stage cost implications
Manage repositories, code review, documentation, and reproducible coding workflows
Identify and propose more correct or efficient implementation choices
Report to the Head Scientist

Requirements

What you’ll need

Several years of software engineering experience, including experience supporting researchers in a lab or comparable setting
Experience translating specific scientific requirements and experiment designs into code
Experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines on human behavior data
Strong Python, including the ability to read and audit code produced by agentic coding tools
Fundamentals of computing: file systems, software libraries, databases, SQL, tabular data, and Git-based workflows
Experience with cloud infrastructure and running many jobs concurrently
Working understanding of machine learning, transformer-based language models, model APIs, and fine-tuning
Habit of writing deterministic, reproducible, cost-aware, and well-documented code
Legally authorized to work in the United States
Willing to work 4 days a week onsite in the San Francisco office
Preferred: Hands-on experience engineering large language model systems, fine-tuning open-weight language models on multi-GPU hardware, serving models with vLLM or SGLang, experiment tracking and cost monitoring, survey or panel data, model activations, GPU provisioning, and generative agents, digital twins, or simulation of human respondents

Benefits

Comp & perks

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