Senior AI Research Engineer

About Phaidra Phaidra is building the future of industrial automation. The world today is filled with static, monolithic infrastructure. Factories, power plants, buildings, etc. operate the same they've operated for decades — because the controls programming is hard-coded. Thousands of lines of rules and heuristics that define how the machines interact with each other. The result of all this hard-coding is that facilities are frozen in time, unable to adapt to their environment while their performance slowly degrades. Phaidra creates AI-powered control systems for the industrial sector, enabling industrial facilities to automatically learn and improve over time. Specifically: * We use reinforcement learning algorithms to provide this intelligence, converting raw sensor data into high-value actions and decisions. * We focus on industrial applications, which tend to be well-sensorized with measurable KPIs — perfect for reinforcement learning. * We enable domain experts (our users) to configure the AI control systems (i.e. agents) without writing code. They define what they want their AI agents to do, and we do it for them. Our team has a track record of applying AI to some of the toughest problems. From achieving superhuman performance with DeepMind's AlphaGo, to reducing the energy required to cool Google's Data Centers by 40%, we deeply understand AI and how to apply it in production for massive impact. Phaidra’s ability to achieve its mission is determined by our ability to work together — as defined by our core values: Agency, Velocity, Craft, and Truth. We seek individuals who embody these values, as they are instrumental in ensuring our team consistently delivers excellence and fosters an engaging and supportive culture Phaidra is based in the USA, but we are 100% remote with no physical office. We hire employees internationally with the help of our partner, OysterHR. Our team is currently located throughout the USA, Canada, UK, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, and India. Who You Are We are looking for an AI Research Engineer to help build the cognitive and behavioral layer of Phaidra’s agents. You sit at the intersection of applied AI research, software engineering, industrial domain reasoning, and product judgment. You understand that high-performing industrial agents are not just LLM wrappers. They require rigorous reasoning frameworks, well-designed tool use, grounded context, behavioral evaluations, and continuous alignment with real operational needs. You care about how agents think, communicate, prioritize, ask for clarification, escalate uncertainty, and turn facility context into useful decisions. You will help define how Phaidra’s agents behave wherever they meet customers, be it Phaidra Prism, Slack/Teams agents, and future autonomous control and field-support workflows. You will design prompts, guardrails, agent evaluation systems, reasoning patterns, and feedback loops that ensure our agents remain useful, reliable, interpretable, and aligned with user intent. * *We are seeking teammates who are based in the UK or North America (Eastern timezone) Responsibilities You will own key parts of the research, behavioral quality, and applied intelligence layer of Phaidra’s agentic products. This includes agent reasoning patterns, personalities, prompts, guardrails, evaluation systems, domain-informed behavior, and the feedback loops used to improve agent performance over time. In Particular, You Will * Design and improve agent reasoning frameworks that help Phaidra’s agents solve complex industrial problems using tools, telemetry, ontology, historical context, and domain logic. * Define and maintain agent personalities, communication patterns, behavioral boundaries, and escalation rules across Phaidra’s agent portfolio. * Develop prompts, system instructions, tool-use policies, and execution loops that help agents act consistently and effectively in industrial contexts. * Build and maintain agent evaluations that measure behavioral quality, domain correctness, user usefulness, safety, hallucination risk, tool-use reliability, and alignment with business requirements. * Translate subject-matter expertise into reusable reasoning patterns, decision frameworks, eval rubrics, and behavioral tests. * Analyze production interactions, user feedback, telemetry, and qualitative signals to identify where agents are succeeding, drifting, or failing. * Partner with Agent Reasoning, Ontology, AI Platform, Product, Solutions, and customer-facing teams to improve agent reliability and usefulness. * Help agents reason over derived tags, operational math, alarms, recommendations, facility context, and customer-specific constraints. * Track state-of-the-art developments in agentic AI, evaluation methods, prompting, tool use, behavioral assurance, and domain-specialized LLM systems. * Contribute to Phaidra’s broader agent strategy by ensuring our agents are not only technically capable, but trustworthy, interpretable, and valuable to users. Key Qualifications * Strong applied AI, machine learning, data science, research engineering, or software engineering background. * Experience working with LLMs, agents, copilots, autonomous workflows, or other AI systems that reason over tools and context. * Ability to translate ambiguous product and domain problems into concrete experiments, prototypes, evals, and production improvements. * Experience evaluating model or agent outputs using qualitative and quantitative methods. * Strong product judgment: you understand what makes an AI system actually useful to users, not merely technically impressive. * Excellent written communication skills, with an ability to craft precise instructions, behavioral guidelines, research notes, and evaluation criteria. * Comfortable collaborating across engineering, product, domain experts, and customer-facing teams. * Ability to reason about ambiguity, uncertainty, edge cases, and failure modes in AI systems. * Good working knowledge of Python. * Shares Phaidra’s company values: Agency, Velocity, Craft, Truth Preferred Experience \& Skills * Experience designing or evaluating LLM agents, tool-using AI systems, prompt systems, guardrails, eval harnesses, red-teaming, or behavioral QA. * Experience with HVAC, datacenter operations, EPMS, BMS/BAS, industrial controls, alarm triage, or root-cause analysis. * Experience with time-series analysis, anomaly detection, derived tags, operational math, symbolic reasoning, or model-informed decision-making. * Experience with RAG systems, knowledge graphs, ontologies, semantic retrieval, or context engineering for AI agents. * Experience building dashboards, evaluation datasets, labeling workflows, or feedback loops for AI products. * Familiarity with agent frameworks, MCP/tool interfaces, LLM observability, or production AI infrastructure. * Track record of turning research ideas into reliable product capabilities. Relevant Technologies from our Stack * Python, Go * LLMs, agent frameworks, prompts, guardrails, and eval tooling * Time-series and operational data systems * Postgres, MongoDB, Parquet * REST and gRPC microservices * Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Kapitan * GCP — GKE, Pub/Sub, CloudSQL, Bigtable * Grafana Cloud, Prometheus * GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Atlantis * Internal agent runtime, tool registries, ontology/context systems, and evaluation workflows Onboarding In your first 30 days… * You will learn Phaidra’s product, customer environments, and agent portfolio. * You will review the current architecture of our agents. * You will study existing prompts, guardrails, evals, user feedback, and known behavioral failure modes. * You will meet partners across Agents, Product, AI Platform, Solutions, Engineering, and Data Science. * You will shadow real or representative agent workflows involving operational insights, alarms, recommendations, or user interactions. In your first 60 days… * You will have a solid understanding of how Phaidra’s agents reason, communicate, and use tools today. * You will ship your first meaningful improvement to an agent prompt, reasoning pattern, eval, or feedback workflow. * You will identify key behavioral risks, drift patterns, or quality gaps in one or more agents. * You will begin defining standards for agent tone, uncertainty handling, escalation, domain reasoning, and evaluation quality. In your first 90 days… * You will independently own a behavioral improvement or evaluation initiative for a production agent. * You will have established a repeatable process for measuring and improving agent quality. * You will help define the AI research and behavioral assurance roadmap for the Agents Team. * You will become a trusted internal voice on whether agents are reasoning correctly, behaving usefully, and operating safely. General Interview Process All of our interviews are held via Google Meet, and an active camera connection is required. * Meeting with Operations (30 minutes) — Meet you, learn about your background, discuss what you're looking for, and cover formalities around your application. * Hiring Manager interview (30 minutes) — An introduction call with the hiring manager focused on your previous experience, technical background, and interest in Phaidra’s agentic systems. * Agent Reasoning \& Behavior Interview (75 minutes) — A working session where you evaluate an agent interaction, identify reasoning or behavioral issues, and propose improvements to tool use, communication, or escalation. * LLM Platform Engineering \& Evals Interview (60 minutes) — A discussion of how you would design experiments, build evals, analyze production behavior, work with the agent runtime and context pipelines, and turn research ideas into reliable product improvements. * Culture fit interview with Phaidra's co-founders (30 minutes) — Alignment with Phaidra's values and mutual cultural fit. We use Kula as our hiring platform. During your interview, Kula's AI Notetaker will record a transcript of the meeting to allow the interviewer to focus on the interview, not the note taking. Base Salary US Residents * Tier 1 (Largest highest-cost metros): 158,200 USD - 217,525 USD * Tier 2 (Other major metros): 150,290 USD - 206,649 USD * Tier 3 (Mid-sized metro areas): 142,380 USD - 195,773 USD * Tier 4 (All other locations): 134,470 USD - 184,896 USD Canada Residents * Tier 1 (Vancouver): 164,923 CAD - 226,768 CAD * Tier 2 (Toronto): 153,928 CAD - 211,651 CAD * Tier 3 (Montreal): 131,938 CAD - 181,415 CAD * Tier 4 (Smaller cities / rural areas): 120,943 CAD - 166,296 CAD UK Residents * Tier 1 (London): 99,707 GBP - 136,823 GBP * Tier 2 (Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Bristol): 93,654 GBP - 128,774 GBP * Tier 3 (Smaller cities / rural areas): 87,801 GBP - 120,725 GBP In addition to base salary, this position is eligible for equity. Final salary will be determined based on several factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies, experience, expertise, education and location. In some cases, final compensation may fall outside the posted range. Salary ranges are regularly reviewed and may be adjusted in response to market trends. Benefits \& Perks * Fast-paced, team-oriented environment where your work directly shapes the company’s direction. * We are a 100% remote company. * Competitive compensation \& meaningful equity. * Outsized responsibilities \& professional development. * Training is foundational; functional, customer immersion, and development training. * Medical, dental, and vision insurance (exact benefits vary by region). * Unlimited paid time off, with a required minimum of 20 days per year. * Paid parental leave (exact benefits vary by region). * Flexible stipends to support your workspace, well-being, and continued professional development. * Company MacBook. Please note: Not all of Phaidra’s benefits and perks listed above apply to temporary employees such as interns. On being Remote We take a thoughtful and intentional approach to remote collaboration. Inspired by pioneers like GitLab, we embrace proven best practices to foster an exceptional remote work environment. Our culture is documentation-first, and we prioritize asynchronous communication to support focus and flexibility across time zones. While we value independence, we stay closely connected through tools like Slack and video conferencing. Weekly all-hands meetings help us align and build strong relationships, and we regularly host virtual team-building activities and social events to maintain a sense of camaraderie. Equal Opportunity Employment Phaidra is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Phaidra is governed on the basis of merit, competence, and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability, or any other legally protected status. We welcome diversity and strive to maintain an inclusive environment for all employees. If you need assistance with completing the application process, please contact us at hiring@phaidra.ai. E-Verify Notice Phaidra participates in E-Verify, an employment authorization database provided through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA). As required by law, we will provide the SSA and, if necessary, the DHS, with information from each new employee’s Form I-9 to confirm work authorization for those residing in the United States. Additional Information About E-Verify Can Be Found Here. To be considered for any position at Phaidra, you must submit an online application. This role will remain open until it is filled. Phaidra only hires individuals who are legally authorized to work in the specified location(s) above. We do not provide employment sponsorship. Candidates requiring visa sponsorship, either now or in the future, are not eligible for hire. Candidates who advance beyond the initial screening stage will be required to sign a Non- Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in order to continue through the interview process. All employment offers are contingent upon successful completion of employment authorization verification and applicable background checks, in accordance with local laws and company policies. WE DO NOT ACCEPT APPLICATIONS FROM RECRUITERS.