Research Engineer (General)
MakerMaker · San Francisco
ABOUT THE COMPANY
We're building autonomous research agents for recursive self-improvement (multi-agent systems that propose, run, and analyze machine learning experiments). We're a small, well-funded team that works onsite in San Francisco.
ABOUT THE ROLE
You'll build and maintain the research systems and pipelines that our research runs on top of: data pipelines, training infrastructure, evaluation tooling, deployment, observability. The work bridges research and production, and you'll be the person who makes "we ran an experiment" actually mean "we ran it correctly, at scale, with results we trust."
You'll own systems end-to-end. You'll work with researchers daily and translate research code into infrastructure that the team can rely on. You'll move fast and you'll be measured on whether your systems make the team faster.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Build and maintain the training, evaluation, and deployment pipelines that our research runs on
Take research code from prototype to production: refactor, harden, instrument, test
Design observability into our research systems (metrics, logs, traces, eval dashboards) so failures surface fast
Own data pipelines for training and evaluation: ingest, dedup, version, validate
Work closely with researchers to understand what they need, what's slow, and what's brittle
Set engineering standards across our research stack (testing, reviews, runbooks) so the team scales
Contribute to architectural decisions that shape how research and production interact
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Senior research engineer with 6+ years building production-grade research systems
Track record across the full lifecycle: data, training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring
Strong distributed systems experience; you've shipped systems that have to be on
Fluent Python, fluent with at least one of (PyTorch, JAX); comfortable at the systems-level when needed
Comfortable with experimentation infrastructure (Ray, Slurm, Kubernetes, or similar)
Bias toward shipping; you prefer working code over working diagrams
Strong written communication
NICE TO HAVE
Experience building experimentation platforms or research infrastructure at a frontier research lab
Background in distributed training systems
Open-source contributions to research infrastructure
History of working effectively with small senior teams
THIS ROLE IS PROBABLY NOT FOR YOU IF
You want to do research with engineering as a side activity: this is engineering as the main thing
Cross-functional work with researchers (translation, scoping, education) doesn't appeal
Long-running ownership of running systems isn't appealing: this role has it
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