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Machine Learning Engineer, Evals

Nous Research United States

Blockchain Services · 51-200 employees

Yesterday
Remote machine-learning Mid (2-5 yrs) Full-time United States
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About the role

You will design and implement evaluation infrastructure for AI agents, including benchmark creation and LLM-as-judge calibration. Additionally, you will perform failure analysis on model outputs and maintain recurring evaluation workflows to support research teams.

What they look for

Machine Learning LLM Evaluation Python Benchmark Design Failure Analysis Prompt Engineering Git CI/CD Docker Linux Data Science RLHF RLVR Statistical Analysis Agentic Workflows

Requirements

Candidates must have 3+ years of experience in software or ML engineering with hands-on experience in LLM evaluation frameworks and prompting. Strong proficiency in Python and familiarity with CI/CD, Docker, and statistical evaluation metrics are required.

Full description

The Role

You'll work across the lab on agent capability evals, benchmark design, LLM-as-judge systems, failure analysis, and the infrastructure that ties it together. This is a high-growth, high-ownership role on a small team, and you'll ship evaluation infrastructure that researchers depend on from day one.

Responsibilities

  • Run the full eval pipeline end to end and reproduce known results during onboarding, pairing with a senior engineer on your first task
  • Build a judge calibration protocol: sample human-labeled decisions, measure agreement (κ, per-class P/R), identify drift zones, and document it so anyone can re-run it
  • Extend an existing benchmark (GAIA, τ-Bench, SWE-bench slice, etc.) with new tasks targeting known capability gaps, including the prompt, environment, rubric, automated grader, and QA
  • Run failure analysis on model outputs: categorize failure modes, quantify prevalence, and write up findings with recommendations for training data, judge prompts, or benchmark changes
  • Own a recurring eval workflow (weekly regression suite, judge drift dashboard, red-team evaluation for a new capability) and ship tooling researchers actually use

Qualifications

  • 3+ years in software engineering, ML engineering, data science, or a research-adjacent role, with concrete evaluation experience from coursework, an internship, a side project, open source work, or a job
  • Experience with at least one LLM evaluation framework (Harbor, Nemo Evaluator, etc.), with real opinions on what it does well and where it falls short
  • Hands-on experience with LLMs: prompting, few-shot design, and ideally fine-tuning or RAG; regular use of coding agents
  • Solid Python. You write clean, tested, version-controlled code that a colleague could run without you babysitting it
  • Comfort with Git, CI/CD basics, Docker, and the Linux command line (SSH, tmux, debugging a remote job)
  • Understanding of basic eval statistics: why accuracy misleads on imbalanced judges, what Cohen's κ measures, how to think about confidence intervals on a metric
  • At least 3 of the following: you can explain why LLM-as-judge needs calibration; you've done failure analysis and can tell model bugs apart from prompt, grader, or retrieval issues; you know at least two agent benchmarks (GAIA, AgentBench, τ-Bench, MINT, SWE-bench, WebShop, ALFWorld) and a limitation of each; you've designed or extended an eval dataset with happy paths, edge cases, and adversarial examples; you've thought about non-determinism in eval, how you sample, how many runs, how you report variance
  • You communicate clearly to both researchers and engineers, in the right language for each
  • You're comfortable with ambiguity, can turn a half-formed request into a plan, and know when to ask for help

Preferred

  • RLVR / RLHF pipeline experience
  • Training data curation experience
  • Distributed eval orchestration experience
  • Benchmark design from scratch
  • Red teaming and adversarial eval experience
  • Familiarity with psychometrics or measurement theory

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