Principal AI Research Engineer

What You'll Do

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• Define and drive the research roadmap for core AI capabilities spanning LLMs, ASR/speech understanding, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic systems.
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• Design, train, fine-tune, and evaluate state-of-the-art models, taking them from prototype to robust, production-grade systems.
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• Lead the architecture of scalable training and inference pipelines that operate reliably on real customer-scale data.
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• Establish rigorous evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and quality bars for model performance, safety, and reliability.
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• Partner closely with product, platform, and ML engineering teams to ship research into customer-facing features.
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• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, set technical standards, and act as a force multiplier across the AI org.
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• Stay ahead of the field, evaluate emerging techniques, and represent Level AI's technical work externally where appropriate.

What You'll Bring

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• Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent research experience; typically 6+ years applying ML/AI in production settings.
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• Deep expertise in modern deep learning, with strong command of LLMs, transformers, and at least one of speech/ASR, NLP, information retrieval, or multimodal modeling.
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• A track record of taking research from idea to deployed, scaled product—not just publications, but shipped impact.
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• Expert-level proficiency in Python and a major deep learning framework (PyTorch preferred), with strong software engineering fundamentals.
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• Hands-on experience training and serving large models, including distributed training, optimization, and efficient inference.
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• Demonstrated technical leadership: setting direction, mentoring engineers, and influencing across teams.
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• Clear communicator able to convey complex technical ideas to both research and product audiences.

Nice to Have

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• Experience in conversational AI, contact center, or speech analytics domains.
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• Publications at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, Interspeech) or significant open-source contributions.
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• Experience with agentic frameworks, tool use, and orchestration of LLM-based systems.
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• Familiarity with model safety, alignment, and responsible AI evaluation.

Why Level AI

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• Work on AI problems that ship to real enterprise customers at scale, with measurable impact.
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• Join a small, high-caliber team where your technical decisions shape the product and the org.
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• Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and comprehensive benefits.
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• A culture that values research depth and pragmatic, production-focused execution in equal measure.
• Level AI is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.