About the role
At Outset, the Research Engineer role is part of the Digital Twins Team, which focuses on creating AI systems that simulate real human responses for user research. The company leverages AI to revolutionize qualitative research, serving major enterprises with innovative, scalable solutions. This position supports scientists by ensuring research experiments are executed accurately and reproducibly, aligning research code with production products.
Day-to-day responsibilities include managing evaluation infrastructure for testing AI models, implementing precise measurement pipelines, maintaining versioned datasets, and building data pipelines for human participant data. The engineer ensures research validity, monitors compute and API usage, and maintains code repositories and documentation. Collaboration with scientists is key to translating experimental designs into reliable, scalable software systems.
Candidates should have several years of software engineering experience supporting research environments, strong Python skills, and familiarity with cloud infrastructure and machine learning concepts, especially transformer-based language models. Preferred qualifications include hands-on experience with large language model systems, fine-tuning, inference frameworks, and experiment tracking. The role is hybrid-based in San Francisco, emphasizing reproducible, cost-aware, and well-documented code development.