Level

Appen

Applied AI Research Engineer

AI in this role

fine-tuningai-research

About the Role 

As an Applied Research Engineer, you’ll build practical AI research assets that support Frontier lab initiatives and customer engagements. This is an implementation-focused role for someone who enjoys turning research concepts into working systems. 

You’ll work with a high degree of autonomy, experimenting with new approaches and developing solutions that can be reused across customer opportunities. You’ll partner closely with the GenAI Research team and cross-functional stakeholders to bring technical ideas into practical applications. 

Your Impact 

  • Build reinforcement learning and agent environments for real customer and Frontier lab use cases, including task specifications, scoring, and evaluation.
  • Develop benchmarks and evaluation harnesses to measure model and data quality across areas such as accuracy, robustness, safety, latency, and cost.
  • Build LLM pipelines and agentic systems that support research, evaluation, and customer trials.
  • Run fine-tuning, adapter, and other model experiments to evaluate how data and methods influence model behavior.
  • Deploy local or self-hosted models for evaluation, inference, and automation workflows.
  • Document experiments, configurations, data, results, and known limitations so other engineers can reproduce and build on your work.
  • Partner with the GenAI Research team and cross-functional stakeholders to turn technical work into reusable assets for customer engagements. 

What You Bring 

  • Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
  • 3+ years of professional engineering or relevant industry experience in AI/ML or software engineering.
  • Strong software engineering skills and experience building reliable, maintainable AI systems.
  • Hands-on experience building agentic systems, reinforcement learning environments, LLM pipelines, or similar AI systems.
  • Experience building evaluation harnesses, benchmarks, or model testing pipelines.
  • Ability to work independently on technical problems and move quickly from an idea or research question to a working solution.
  • Strong understanding of experimentation, reproducibility, and technical documentation. 

Nice to Haves 

  • Developed synthetic data generation systems or datasets.
  • Published research papers, benchmarks, or other technical research.
  • Worked with SWE-bench or similar software engineering evaluation environments.
  • Built or deployed local inference, open-weight models, or self-hosted model environments. 

How we rate this

Applied AI Research Engineer at Appen rates 99 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. Open the description and count.

Prepare for this job

A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Fine TuningAI Research

Questions you could be asked

  1. Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
  2. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  3. How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
  4. Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Fine Tuning and AI Research. 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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