Research Engineer

WHO WE ARE

Percepta’s mission is to transform critical institutions with applied AI. We care that industries that power the world (e.g. healthcare, manufacturing, energy) benefit from frontier technology.

To make that happen, we embed with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation. We bring together: https://challenge.percepta.ai

• Forward-deployed expertise in engineering, product, and research
• Mosaic, our in-house toolkit for rapidly deploying agentic workflows
• Strategic partnerships with Anthropic, McKinsey, AWS, companies within the General Catalyst portfolio, and more

Our team is a quickly growing group of Applied AI Engineers, Embedded Product Managers and Researchers motivated by diffusing the promise of AI into improvements we can feel in our day to day lives.

Percepta is a direct partnership with General Catalyst, a global transformation and investment company.

About The Role

As a Research Engineer at Percepta, you'll work closely with the core research and the product team to build and scale modeling capabilities. All of our core research areas rest on the some of the same underlying foundation: large-scale training / inference infrastructure, and reliable distributed systems. Our four research tracks are: world modeling, forecasting, user modeling, and optimization. You'll build and own that foundation, work embedded directly inside customer environments to understand where it needs to flex, and ship the production systems that turn research ideas from any of our four tracks into something real and deployed.

Responsibilities

• Work backwards from our long-term research vision to surface and prioritize the infrastructure and tooling work that connects our ambition to near-term business value.
• Rapidly prototype, build, and deploy AI systems that work in the wild with real users, real data, and real production constraints.
• Iterate quickly based on user feedback and partner closely with stakeholders to ensure what you build is used, trusted, and adopted.
• Embed directly within customer environments, build trust, and become their embedded technical partner on applied AI while raising the ceiling of what’s possible with their data and infrastructure.
• Encode what you learn into Mosaic, our core product, consistently contributing new features, patterns, and abstractions back into the platform.
• Partner with our Embedded Product Managers to translate what you learn into reusable playbooks that help us drive faster transformation with future customers.

What We Are Looking For

• Are motivated by high-leverage infrastructure and systems work that underpins research across multiple tracks.
• Have experience with high-performance, large-scale distributed systems and are comfortable being the person that scales research ideas into ones that actually run in production.
• Have a proven track record of execution in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
• Are an excellent communicator with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Enjoy extreme ownership.
• Are passionate about AI's transformative potential.

Bonus If You Have

• Large-scale model training and inference.
• Implementing LLM post-training recipes.
• Deeply familiar with vLLM/SGLang, Ray and Kubernetes.
• Distributed checkpointing and multi-node/multi-GPU training.
• Asynchronous training and inference - VeRL, ROLL, SkyRL, AReaL, or asynchronous RL libraries like CleanRL.

ABOUT OUR TEAM

As an organization, Percepta is committed to inclusion and belonging, and our people are our greatest investment! We’re working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won’t be easy, but it will likely be the most fulfilling work of your career.

In addition to competitive compensation, equity, 401(k) matching, comprehensive health and family benefits, and lunch every day, we offer a culture built on autonomy and trust. We strongly believe that the boldest solutions come from teams who dream bigger together, and that means bringing in people from every kind of background, experience, and path. We are an office-first team that values the impact of in-person collaboration, but we focus on outcomes over outputs - believing that we are each responsible for solving the "whole problem" to make our customers win.

If you don't check every box on this description but you care deeply about the problems we're tackling, seeking the truth, and wanting to own outcomes alongside a team that has your back, then we want to hear from you! We know self-doubt keeps great people from applying, so please don't count yourself out before we've had the chance to meet you. Tackling the hardest problems takes a range of perspectives in the room, and we believe that's how we build something truly game-changing.

Our company values are more than just words on a page. They inform how our team shows up every day:

OUR VALUES

Dream bigger: We have the unique privilege of taking on the most ambitious problems and we should chase them with optimism, responsibility, and genuine belief that we can make it happen. We have to embrace the hard things when no one else will.

Heart in the game: What we're doing matters and we have to give a shit. Internally, that means fixing badness when you find it. Externally, it means honoring the trust our customers place in us with their most important problems. This isn’t a 9-5, nor is it a job we’re ever going to monitor your hours. We promise to put work in front of you that matters and in return, we ask you to promise to care.

Win for the customer: Everyone is an engineer and the job of an engineer is to deliver outcomes, not outputs. Everything we do - the products we build, the partnerships we launch, the strategy we set - exists to make our customers successful. Delivery is the strategy.

Make the call: Organizations are only as strong as the pace at which they make decisions. Everyone at Percepta should feel empowered to commit and shape the ambiguity in front of them. But "make the call" cuts both ways: make the decision and make the phone call. High-agency decision-making only works with high-bandwidth communication and we commit to never operate in silos.

Intensity with kindness: We believe in excellence in execution, candor in feedback, ruthlessness in prioritization, and survivalist urgency. We also believe you don't need to be an asshole to deliver on any of this. The trust built through shared kindness and vulnerability is what makes the intensity sustainable.

Percepta is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we evaluate every qualified applicant on their merits and give equal consideration for employment regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, veteran or uniformed service status, age, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law. Percepta provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees in accordance with federal and applicable state law.