Staff Research Engineer – Recursive Self-Improvement Lead
Sequen ยท via
Devremote
๐ฐ $350,000 - $400,000/yr
๐ Remote
Job Description:
- Define the research roadmap for recursive self-improvement and decide what ships
- Design and test exploration policies, compute allocation across parallel agents, and agents that revise their own instructions and strategy
- Turn recorded research sessions into training and evaluation signal
- Define what constitutes better research and build evaluations with the RRI team
- Make knowledge learned in one session improve subsequent sessions across tasks and clients
- Track RSI, autonomous research, and agentic LLM literature and turn promising ideas into measured experiments
- Work with applied scientists using RRI on real client problems to identify agent shortcomings
- Write code and ship successful research into systems used by clients in production
- Help grow the Recursive Self-Improvement team
Requirements:
- 7+ years of experience in applied ML research or research engineering
- Hands-on work in at least one of LLM agents, AutoML, meta-learning, recursive self-improvement, or a closely related area
- Experience taking research ideas from prototype to a measured improvement in a shipped product or production system
- Experimental rigor with baselines, ablations, seeds, and confidence intervals
- Production-quality Python and ability to build experiments end to end
- Understanding of frontier model behavior in long agentic loops, including context limits, compaction, tool use, failure modes, and cost
- Ability to take accountability for a research direction in an early-stage team
- Experience leading or mentoring a small research team
- Peer-reviewed publications or widely used open-source work in agents, RL, or AutoML may be advantageous
- Experience with reinforcement learning or LLM post-training, such as RLHF, reward modelling, or training agents with RL may be advantageous
- Experience building evaluations or benchmarks for LLMs or agents may be advantageous
- Background in search, recommendation, or learning-to-rank models may be advantageous
- Experience with multi-agent systems or agent swarms may be advantageous
Benefits:
- Unlimited paid time off
- Flexible hybrid/remote configurations
- Highly collaborative, world-class engineering culture
- Equity