About the role
THE ROLE
You'll build AI systems that can complete real work end to end. The work sits between applied research and production engineering: understanding model behavior, designing agent architectures, building evaluations, and building off of the latest research.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design and build long-horizon agents that plan, use tools, maintain state, recover from failure, and interact with data and source systems.
- Build evaluations for agent decisions and end-to-end task performance.
- Test and integrate frontier models across complex life sciences workflows.
- Develop the tooling and infrastructure needed to create, debug, and improve agents quickly.
- Build the tool chain to enable the delivery of agent systems in partnership with AI Strategy and product.
- Own systems from early exploration through production operation, including reliability, observability, and ongoing improvement.
- Share clear technical findings that help the team make better architecture and model decisions.
REQUIREMENTS
- Research-grade engineers who ship: You can investigate a hard technical question rigorously, make a clear decision, and turn the result into production software.
- Strong AI systems judgment: You understand that model quality depends on the surrounding system, including tools, context, state, evaluation, and human oversight.
- Pragmatic problem solvers: You choose approaches based on evidence and tradeoffs, not ideology.
- High agency: You can take an ambiguous goal, create structure, and move the work forward without waiting for a detailed specification.
- Owners: You care about the quality, clarity, reliability, and long-term maintainability of what you build.
- Clear collaborators: You communicate technical ideas simply and work well across engineering, AI Strategy, and product.
NICE TO HAVE
- You have built agents, model evaluation systems, or other production AI applications.
- You have experience with fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or applied model research.
- You have built distributed systems or infrastructure for AI applications.
- You have worked in a high-growth early-stage company.
- You are familiar with parts of our stack: Next.js, TypeScript, Python, Postgres, Azure, AWS.
BENEFITS
- Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents.
- Generous PTO policy.
- Paid parental leave.
At Valkai, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.