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About This Role
Job Description:
Job Overview
We are looking for a Research Engineer to build simulation environments, training workflows, and evaluation systems for embodied AI and robotics.
You will help create the virtual environments and tools that enable robotic policies to be trained, tested, and evaluated at scale before being deployed in the real world. Depending on your expertise, you may focus on simulation-based policy training and evaluation, or on scene reconstruction and synthetic data generation.
This role is ideal for an engineer with strong simulation or robotics experience who enjoys building technically grounded environments that support real learning and measurable improvements in robotic performance.
What You Will Own
- Build and maintain simulation environments for robot learning, training, and evaluation.
- Develop robotic tasks, environments, reward functions, and evaluation metrics.
- Work with platforms such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, or similar simulation frameworks.
- Support simulation-based policy training and automated evaluation at scale.
- Implement domain randomization and other techniques to improve policy robustness and sim-to-real transfer.
- Develop sensor simulation, synthetic data generation, or scene reconstruction workflows as relevant to your specialization.
- Validate simulation results against real-world robot behavior and investigate discrepancies.
- Build reusable simulation tools and pipelines that improve experiment reproducibility and research efficiency.
Required Qualifications
- Experience in robotics simulation, robotics research, simulation-based training, or a related technical field.
- Strong Python programming skills and familiarity with relevant robotics or simulation tools.
- Experience with at least one simulation platform, such as Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, or an equivalent framework.
- Understanding of robotic systems, 3D environments, physics simulation, or learning-based robotics.
- Experience building functional simulation environments, training workflows, evaluation pipelines, or synthetic data systems.
- Strong debugging and experimental skills, with the ability to validate whether simulation results reflect meaningful real-world behavior.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience training or evaluating robotic policies in simulation.
- Experience with domain randomization, sim-to-real transfer, or sensor simulation.
- Experience with scene reconstruction, synthetic data generation, or physically grounded 3D environment creation.
- Experience building reusable tools for large-scale simulation or automated evaluation.
- Experience comparing simulation results with real-world robot performance.
Note: Candidates may specialize in either simulation-based policy training and evaluation or scene reconstruction and synthetic data generation. Experience across both areas is not required. However, candidates should demonstrate technical depth beyond visual scene creation alone.
Default Benefits:
- Health insurance
- Vision care
- Dental coverage
- 401(k)
- Paid holidays
- PTO (Paid Time Off)
- Sick leave
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 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, Research Engineer positions make up 2% of the market. At MaxInsights, 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 $252,000 based on 457 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and AI Engineering Manager ($251,622). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
MaxInsights AI Hiring
MaxInsights has 4 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across Research Engineer. Based in Santa Clara, CA, US.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (531 positions) offer remote work, while 8,478 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (3,078 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,646 roles, $261,000 median); Los Angeles (1,486 roles, $210,000 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 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 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 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). 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 (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) 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 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 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 $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. 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 $256,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. 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 (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 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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