Manager of Research Engineering (Foundational Research)

• As the Manager of Research Engineering, you will sit at the critical intersection of cutting-edge academic research and robust software engineering. You will lead the team responsible for turning experimental code into scalable assets and ensuring our researchers have the compute and tooling required to compete with the world’s top AI labs
• Engineering Leadership: Manage, mentor, and grow a team of Research Engineers. You will foster a culture of engineering rigor (code quality, testing, CI/CD) within a fast-paced, experimental research environment
• Infrastructure & LLMOps Strategy: Own the technical strategy for our LLM training and inference infrastructure. This includes managing distributed compute clusters (LambdaLabs/AWS), orchestration platforms (e.g., ClearML, Kubernetes), and data pipelines
• Vendor & Governance Management: Lead the evaluation and onboarding of external technology vendors. You will act as the primary liaison with Sourcing, Procurement, Risk, and Privacy teams to ensure our tooling infrastructure is compliant, secure, and procured efficiently, unblocking the research team from administrative overhead
• Bridge Research & Production: Act as the primary translator between the Foundational Research team and the wider Platform/Engineering organizations. You will ensure that research innovations are architected in a way that allows them to be successfully handed off to production teams
• Product-Minded Engineering: Drive a product-oriented mindset within the research engineering team, ensuring that infrastructure, tooling, and experimental frameworks are designed not just for technical excellence but with clear user outcomes in mind. Champion practices like defining success metrics for internal platforms, gathering feedback from product partners, and prioritizing work based on impact to downstream product value
• Operational Rigor: Remove ambiguity for your team by translating high-level research goals into concrete engineering roadmaps. You will implement observability, alerting, and resource management strategies to ensure efficient use of our massive compute budget
• Hands-on Contribution: While primarily a leader, you are willing to roll up your sleeves to review code, debug distributed training failures, and architect complex system integrations

You are not just a manager; you are a builder who understands the unique challenges of Deep Learning infrastructure. You bring a product-oriented lens to engineering — you’ve led teams that didn’t just ship features but owned outcomes, defined success criteria, and iterated based on user feedback, whether those users were internal researchers or external customersExperience: 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years leading or managing engineering teamsProduct-Oriented Leadership: Demonstrated experience leading engineering efforts with a product mindset, defining roadmaps tied to user/business outcomes, working cross-functionally with product and business stakeholders, and making build-vs-buy decisions grounded in impact rather than purely technical preferenceEducation: BSc, MSc, or PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related fieldHands-on experience with Distributed Training infrastructure (Multi-node GPU training, Kubernetes, vLLM)Experience with MLOps tools and experiment tracking (e.g., ClearML, MLFlow, Weights & Biases)Deep proficiency in Python and modern software development practicesOperational Mindset: Experience managing cloud resources (AWS/Azure/GCP) and optimizing for cost/performanceResearch Fluency: Ability to read technical research papers and translate them into engineering requirements. You don’t need to write the paper, but you need to understand the architecture required to support itFamiliarity with Deep Learning frameworks (PyTorch)Experience owning the end-to-end lifecycle of an internal developer platform or ML tooling product, including defining adoption metrics and iterating based on user researchExperience working in a Research Lab or “0-to-1” innovation environmentBackground in Platform EngineeringExperience contributing to open-source LLM or NLP libraries