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Level AI

Lead Research Engineer - Applied AI

Level AI, San Francisco

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About Level AILevel AI is revolutionizing customer experience by transforming contact centers into strategic assets through state-of-the-art AI. Our platform leverages LLMs and real-time intelligence to understand complex customer interactions and drive better business outcomes.
Role Overview - We’re looking for a hands-on and visionary Lead Applied AI Researcher to spearhead cutting-edge advancements in agentic AI systems. This role will focus on building intelligent, decision-making agents powered by reinforcement learning, LLM fine-tuning, and multi-agent frameworks to enhance our AI-native CX platform.
Key Responsibilities

  • Design and build agentic systems that operate autonomously across multi-step tasks
  • Apply and adapt reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to real-world interaction and decision-making problems
  • Fine-tune and optimize large language models (LLMs) for dialog management, summarization, and real-time analysis of customer interactions
  • Lead rapid prototyping and applied research on intelligent agent behavior, planning, and memory across various domains
  • Collaborate closely with engineering, product, and data teams to bring research into production at scale
  • Stay current with advancements in open-source LLMs, RL frameworks, and cognitive architectures, integrating them when relevant
  • Publish internal whitepapers and influence long-term AI strategy at Level AI

Qualifications
  • Experience in CS, Machine Learning, or a related field
  • 5 - 10+ years in applied AI roles with proven contributions to LLM, RL, or agentic research
  • Experience expertise in:
  • Reinforcement Learning (e.g., PPO, GRPO)
  • Agentic systems (planning, memory, autonomy)
  • LLM fine-tuning (PEFT, LoRA, RLHF)
  • Proficiency with PyTorch, Hugging Face, Ray RLlib, or similar libraries
  • Experience shipping research to production in high-stakes environments
  • Strong publication record or open-source contributions a plus
  • BonusExperience with dialog agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or multi-agent collaboration frameworks
  • Background in building or scaling tool-using agents in enterprise contexts

Why Join Us? Work at the frontier of LLM + agentic system research applied to real business problems.
Collaborate with a world-class team in a high-growth, Series C startup.
Competitive salary, equity, and benefits.

Seniority level

  • Seniority level

    Mid-Senior level

Employment type

  • Employment type

    Full-time

Job function

  • Job function

    Engineering and Information Technology
  • Industries

    Transportation, Logistics, Supply Chain and Storage

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