Member of Technical Staff - Research
Valkai· Engineering
Hybrid (New York, NY), Hybrid (San Francisco, CA)$0Full TimePosted 1mo ago
About the role
Research-focused engineer with strong ML and system-building experience, turning complex real-world problems into research questions and deploying evaluable solutions from training to production.
Responsibilities
- Own applied research projects from problem definition and experiment design through implementation and production validation.
- Train and adapt models for the reasoning, retrieval, and decision-making tasks
- Develop and test improvements to agent systems, including tool use, context, memory, planning, and recovery from failures.
- Build datasets, evaluation environments, and grading methods that capture the difficulty of real workflows.
- Inspect model outputs and agent traces, identify recurring failure modes, and turn those findings into changes to training, data, or system design.
- Build the experimentation tools and pipelines needed to run, compare, and reproduce research efficiently.
- Partner with AI Strategy, product, and engineering to understand workflows and ship improvements to production.
Qualifications
- Deep ML foundations: understanding of learning, optimization, probability, and statistics, and ability to reason about model behavior and experimental results.
- Hands-on model experience: trained, adapted, or improved models and can explain decisions behind work (e.g., post-training, reinforcement learning).
- Research judgment: ability to turn ambiguous problems into clear hypotheses, design experiments, and develop new approaches.
- Strong applied judgment: awareness of quality, reliability, latency, and cost; know when to improve model, data, or system.
- High agency and ownership: define research direction, take responsibility for outcomes, move from investigation to execution without waiting for a plan.
- Clear collaborators: communicate findings and uncertainty clearly, seek domain context, help research, engineering, and product decisions.
Skills
Required:Machine Learning foundationsModel training and adaptationExperiment design
Benefits
- Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents.
- Generous PTO policy.
- Paid parental leave.
Last updated Sep 18, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Valkai
Agent Systems for Life Sciences
Valkai brings life back to life sciences — Agent Systems that coordinate and automate complex workflows across teams.
Agent SystemsLife SciencesSecurityAIAutomation
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