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About This Role
Posted Date 7/19/2026
Description
We Are:
We are at the forefront of a new era in enterprise AI — one defined not by model capability alone, but by the infrastructure, memory systems, and routing intelligence required to make autonomous AI agents trustworthy and commercially viable at scale. Our Data \& AI practice brings together more than 45,000 professionals helping clients design, deploy, and govern AI systems across regulated industries. Our applied research function sits at the intersection of frontier AI research and production engineering — investigating the foundational challenges that will determine whether enterprise agentic AI succeeds or stalls.
You Are:
As a Senior Advanced AI Research Engineer, you sit at the boundary between AI systems research and production platform engineering. You investigate hard, open problems in agentic AI — and you close the loop: turning research findings into engineered prototypes, then into platform\-ready capabilities that real workloads depend on. You are a strong Python engineer who can move fluently between an experiment and a well\-structured service or SDK module. You write research artefacts and production code in the same week, and you understand why both matter.
The Work:
Applied Research \& Innovation:
- Investigate active innovation frontiers in agentic AI systems — for example, agent memory and knowledge persistence architectures, model selection and inference routing strategies, autonomy and goal\-anchoring control planes, and long\-horizon task reliability. The specific focus areas evolve with client demand and research opportunity.
- Design and execute rigorous benchmarking and evaluation methodologies scoped to production\-relevant agentic task profiles — covering dimensions such as tool use, structured output generation, multi\-step reasoning, instruction following, and failure recovery.
- Investigate efficiency and scalability frontiers — such as inference cost reduction, context management at scale, and retrieval architecture design — that determine whether agent workloads can be served commercially on attainable hardware.
- Contribute to external publications, technical reports, and conference submissions that establish thought leadership and build the evidence base for client and platform decisions.
Translational Engineering:
- Translate research findings into production\-grade implementations: engineered Python services, Node.js/TypeScript SDK modules, or platform\-integrated components that other engineers and agent workloads depend on.
- Build well\-defined provider interfaces and pluggable backends for research components — memory stores, retrieval layers, routing modules — so that experimental implementations can be iterated on and swapped independently of the platform code that depends on them.
- Prototype and validate platform\-level capabilities — such as inference routing policies, memory management layers, or agent control mechanisms — and carry them through from experiment to integrated, observable system component.
- Instrument research prototypes with observability from the start — distributed tracing, cost accounting, and latency metrics — so findings are reproducible and platform integration is low\-friction.
Platform Contribution \& Integration:
- Work alongside platform engineers to integrate validated research capabilities into production systems — contributing well\-tested, documented Python and Node.js/TypeScript code through standard engineering workflows including code review, CI, and schema validation.
- Identify platform gaps surfaced by research experiments — missing APIs, insufficient observability, constrained interfaces — and raise them as concrete, scoped engineering proposals.
- Ensure that research\-derived capabilities meet production standards: correct error handling, sensible defaults, documented contracts, and test coverage appropriate to their risk profile.
Collaboration \& Communication:
- Work closely with platform engineers, product managers, and enterprise architects to align research priorities with real client deployment blockers and platform roadmap needs.
- Communicate research findings, architectural trade\-offs, and prototype results clearly to both technical peers and non\-technical stakeholders — in written artefacts, design reviews, and client\-facing sessions.
- Mentor junior engineers and researchers on experimental methodology, translational engineering practices, and production\-quality code standards.
Travel may be required for this role. The amount of travel will vary from 0 to 100% depending on business need and client requirements.
This role requires working onsite in Mountain View, CA. Applicants must be local or willing to relocate to Mountain View area prior to joining.
Here's what you need
- Bachelor's degree (or equivalent minimum 12 years work experience, or minimum 6 years' work experience with Associate's degree) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
- Minimum of 5 years of experience with Python and/or Node.js/TypeScript, building and shipping production backend services, research prototypes, or AI/ML systems.
- Minimum of 5 years of hands\-on experience with AI or ML systems — such as large language models, agent frameworks, inference serving, or retrieval and memory architectures.
Bonus points if you have
- 6\+ years of engineering experience across both research and production contexts, with a demonstrated ability to ship research into running systems.
- Deep experience in at least one area of applied AI systems research — such as agent memory and knowledge management, inference efficiency and model routing, agentic evaluation methodology, or long\-horizon task and autonomy research.
- 3\+ years of applied research with a track record of translating findings into platform\-integrated or published artefacts — prototypes, open\-source contributions, internal frameworks, or peer\-reviewed papers.
- Hands\-on experience with async Python (e.g. FastAPI, asyncio), containerisation and Kubernetes, vector and relational databases, and distributed tracing instrumentation (e.g. OpenTelemetry).
- Familiarity with modern AI agent framework ecosystems and agent communication protocols — the specific tools matter less than the ability to work across multiple frameworks and evaluate them critically.
- Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field is strongly preferred.
Compensation at Accenture varies depending on a wide array of factors, which may include but are not limited to the specific office location, role, skill set, and level of experience. As required by local law, Accenture provides a reasonable range of compensation for roles that may be hired as set forth below.
We anticipate this job posting will be posted until 06/30/2026\.
Accenture offers a market competitive suite of benefits including medical, dental, vision, life, and long\-term disability coverage, a 401(k) plan, bonus opportunities, paid holidays, and paid time off. See more information on our benefits here:
U.S. Employee Benefits \| Accenture
Role Location Annual Salary Range
California $132,500 to $338,300
Cleveland $122,700 to $270,600
Colorado $132,500 to $292,200
District of Columbia $141,100 to $311,200
Illinois $122,700 to $292,200
Maryland $132,500 to $292,200
Massachusetts $132,500 to $311,200
Minnesota $132,500 to $292,200
New York $122,700 to $338,300
New Jersey $141,100 to $338,300
Washington $141,100 to $311,200
\#LI\-NA\-FY25
Requesting an Accommodation
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If you would like to be considered for employment opportunities with Accenture and have accommodation needs such as for a disability or religious observance, please call us toll free at 1 (877\) 889\-9009 or send us an email or speak with your recruiter.
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
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For details, view a copy of the Accenture Equal Opportunity Statement
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Other Employment Statements
Applicants for employment in the US must have work authorization that does not now or in the future require sponsorship of a visa for employment authorization in the United States.
Candidates who are currently employed by a client of Accenture or an affiliated Accenture business may not be eligible for consideration.
Job candidates will not be obligated to disclose sealed or expunged records of conviction or arrest as part of the hiring process. Further, at Accenture a criminal conviction history is not an absolute bar to employment.
The Company will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. Additionally, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the Company's legal duty to furnish information.
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We work with one shared purpose: to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity. Every day, more than 775,000 of us help our stakeholders continuously reinvent. Together, we drive positive change and deliver value to our clients, partners, shareholders, communities, and each other.
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Salary132,500\.00 \- 338,300\.00 Annual
Type
Full\-time
Salary Context
This $122K-$338K range is above the median for Research Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $207K across 63 roles with salary data).
View full Research Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
Research Engineers bridge the gap between research and production. They implement papers, build experiment infrastructure, optimize training pipelines, and make research prototypes production-ready. They're the engineers who make research work at scale.
The role sits at a unique intersection. You need to understand the math well enough to implement novel architectures correctly, and you need the engineering chops to make them run efficiently on distributed systems. When a research scientist has a breakthrough idea, you're the person who turns it from a notebook prototype into a training pipeline that runs on 256 GPUs.
Across the 4,317 AI roles we're tracking, Research Engineer positions make up 2% of the market. At Information Technology Senior Management Forum, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Research Engineer roles are growing as AI labs recognize that research velocity depends on engineering quality. The role is less competitive than Research Scientist (no PhD required), but the bar for engineering skill is very high. These roles are concentrated at major labs and well-funded startups.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week involves: implementing a new attention mechanism from a recent paper, profiling and optimizing a training pipeline that's bottlenecked on data loading, building evaluation infrastructure for a new benchmark, debugging distributed training issues across a GPU cluster, and pair-programming with a research scientist on their latest experiment. The work is deeply technical.
Research Engineer roles are growing as AI labs recognize that research velocity depends on engineering quality. The role is less competitive than Research Scientist (no PhD required), but the bar for engineering skill is very high. These roles are concentrated at major labs and well-funded startups.
Skills Required
Strong software engineering fundamentals plus ML knowledge. Python, C++, and CUDA experience are common requirements. You'll need to read papers and turn ideas into working code. Distributed systems experience (especially distributed training) is highly valued. Performance optimization skills separate great candidates from good ones.
Experience with large-scale training infrastructure (FSDP, DeepSpeed, Megatron), GPU programming (CUDA, Triton), and the internals of ML frameworks (PyTorch internals, custom autograd functions) is what makes candidates stand out. The best research engineers can debug issues that span the full stack from GPU memory management to numerical precision to algorithmic correctness.
Strong postings mention the team's recent research, the infrastructure scale, and the specific technical challenges. They often list the research areas you'd support. Look for roles that emphasize both implementation quality and research understanding.
Compensation Benchmarks
Research Engineer roles pay a median of $272,100 based on 227 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400. This role's midpoint ($230K) sits 15% below the category median. Disclosed range: $122K to $338K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($287,500) and AI Engineering Manager ($244,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,000; Mid: $194,400; Senior: $227,400; Director: $274,554; VP: $241,000.
Information Technology Senior Management Forum AI Hiring
Information Technology Senior Management Forum has 21 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Engineering Manager, AI Product Manager, Data Scientist. Positions span Basking Ridge, NJ, US, Fort Worth, TX, US, New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $154K - $413K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 15% (635 positions) offer remote work, while 3,657 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (1,650 roles, $220,000 median); San Francisco (1,335 roles, $265,000 median); Los Angeles (708 roles, $214,112 median).
Career Path
Common paths into Research Engineer roles include Software Engineer, ML Engineer, Research Intern.
From here, career progression typically leads toward Senior Research Engineer, Research Scientist, ML Architect.
This is one of the best entry points into AI research without a PhD. Build a strong engineering portfolio with ML projects, contribute to open-source ML frameworks, and demonstrate that you can implement complex ideas correctly and efficiently. The transition to Research Scientist is possible with published first-author work, which some research engineer roles support.
What to Expect in Interviews
Technical screens test both engineering skill and research understanding. Expect coding rounds with performance-critical implementations (GPU optimization, efficient data loading). Be prepared to discuss papers relevant to the team's research area and explain how you'd implement key ideas. System design questions focus on training infrastructure: distributed training, experiment tracking, and compute resource management.
When evaluating opportunities: Strong postings mention the team's recent research, the infrastructure scale, and the specific technical challenges. They often list the research areas you'd support. Look for roles that emphasize both implementation quality and research understanding.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 4,317 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 138 entry-level, 2,071 mid-level, 1,655 senior, and 453 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (635 positions). The remaining 3,657 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($287,500 median, 34 roles); Research Engineer ($272,100 median, 227 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($244,000 median, 23 roles).
Research Engineer roles are growing as AI labs recognize that research velocity depends on engineering quality. The role is less competitive than Research Scientist (no PhD required), but the bar for engineering skill is very high. These roles are concentrated at major labs and well-funded startups.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 4,317 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (3,004), Data Scientist (345), AI Software Engineer (309). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (138) are outnumbered by mid-level (2,071) and senior (1,655) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 453 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (635 positions), with 3,657 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $215,000. Top-quartile roles start at $266,300, and the 90th percentile reaches $320,790. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $287,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (2,249 postings), Aws (1,224 postings), Azure (938 postings), Rag (915 postings), Gcp (660 postings), Pytorch (640 postings), Prompt Engineering (624 postings), Kubernetes (559 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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