Level

PostHog

AI Research Engineer

PostHog is hiring an AI Research Engineer. Level rates it ; you can apply on PostHog.

Level's read on this job

  • Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this role: the job is building AI systems.
  • The posting allows some remote work.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include PyTorch, Python and TypeScript.
  • Level lists 9 other open roles at PostHog.

AI in this role

Build and research AI systems and tools for querying and interacting with product and context data at PostHog.

pytorchpythontypescript
ai-researchmachine-learningsoftware-engineeringai-observability

About PostHog

PostHog is your product’s context layer. It ingests and stores your analytics, errors, replays, and business data so you and your agents can query and act on it.

We launched out of Y Combinator's W20 cohort. We've since shipped more than a dozen products, including:

We are:

  1. Product-led. More than 500K organizations have installed PostHog, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit.

  2. Default alive. Revenue is growing incredibly quickly, and we're very efficient. We raise money to push ambition and grow faster, not to keep the lights on.

  3. Well-funded. We've raised more than $180m from some of the world's top investors. We're set up for a long, ambitious journey.

We're focused on building an awesome product for end users, hiring exceptional teammates, shipping fast, and being as weird as possible.

 

Things we care about

  • Transparency: Everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, our strategy, and how we work, in our public company handbook. Internally, we share revenue, notes and slides from board meetings, and fundraising plans, so everyone has the context they need to make good decisions.

  • Autonomy: We don’t tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on what's going to have the biggest impact on our customers, and what they find interesting and motivating to work on. Engineers lead product teams and make product decisions. Teams are flexible and easy to change when needed.

  • Shipping fast: Why not now? We want to build a lot of products; we can't do that shipping at a normal pace. We've built the company around small teams – autonomous, highly-efficient groups of cracked engineers who can outship much larger companies because they own their products end-to-end.

  • Time for building: Nothing gets shipped in a meeting. We're a natively remote company. We default to async communication – PRs > Issues > Slack. Tuesdays and Thursdays are meeting-free days, and we prioritize heads down building time over perfect coordination. This will be the most productive job you've ever had.

  • Being weird: Weird means redesigning an already world-class website for the 5th time. It means shipping literally every product that relates to customer data. It means building an objectively unnecessary developer toy with dubious shareholder value. Doing weird stuff is a competitive advantage. And it's fun.

Who we're looking for

PostHog is working on a self-driving product and is training its own Deep ML models. To do this, we have a new AI Research team.

We track more products across more dimensions than any other company on Earth. Because of this, we have petabytes of data across events, errors, session replays, revenue data, and more. It’s an exceptionally large amount of data relative to our company size, and we want to use it for our users' benefit. Just imagine how, with the vast amount of data we capture, we can automatically surface insights and suggest fixes.

As an AI Research Engineer, you will play a substantial part in making this happen. This team is brand new, so you will have real autonomy, be close to customers, and greatly influence what we actually ship.

On the finance side, we have around $150M on our balance sheet, we’re "default alive," and we have a real business that has been scaling rapidly and running exceptionally efficiently with good margins for six years. We invest in what we believe moves the needle.

What you'll be doing

You'll be part of a team that researches what's next and what's better, and actually brings it into production.

Areas we’re exploring

  • Session replay analysis: We already detect issues in replays, but doing so is expensive and doesn’t scale. With better models (and a huge amount of DOM mutation data), we think we can make this faster, cheaper, and best-in-class.

  • User behavior prediction: Identifying drop-offs, suggesting improvements, and potentially improving conversion rates automatically without heavy manual analysis or agent overhead.

  • Synthetic user testing: Simulating users to catch confusing flows or breakages before release. If this works, it could remove one of the biggest bottlenecks in modern engineering: testing (rather than writing code).

Job Requirements

  • A PhD is a plus, but a strong background in math is a must, or you have previous experience training models (strong math skills are still required).

  • Strong PyTorch experience.

  • Strong ability to code in Rust, CUDA, or C (with a preference for Rust).

  • Solid understanding of Transformers (not the movies).

  • A product mindset. you’ll be building things!

  • This is a unique role within PostHog and, as such, is a hybrid-remote position based out of our London office.

What we’re not looking for

  • Pure theoretical expertise: this is not a Jupyter notebook job.

  • Someone who just wants to do research and publish. Yes, you can publish, but shipping takes priority.

We are committed to ensuring a fair and accessible interview process. If you need any accommodations or adjustments, please let us know

 

#LI-DNI

How we rate this

AI Research Engineer at PostHog rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI ResearchMachine learningSoftware EngineeringAI ObservabilityPyTorchPythonTypeScript

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  2. Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where software engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where ai observability was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Walk me through how you've used PyTorch in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Machine learning, Software Engineering, AI Observability, and PyTorch. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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