Principal AI Researcher

There are NO limits to your career: come shape the future and be part of a truly unique global culture at OutSystems!

### Join the AI Research & Solutions Group

You're the engineer other engineers come to when the model won't converge, the paper's results don't reproduce, or the production system needs to be 10x faster. You've spent years in the trenches—training models, building datasets, debugging distributed failures—and you've developed deep intuition about what actually works.

As a **Principal AI Engineer** in the AI Research & Solutions group, you'll work hands-on 
at least 3 days a week in the office in Menlo Park, serving as the senior technical leader 
for ML systems that power enterprise AI agents. 

We're building AI agents that reason, act, and recover across long-horizon workflows spanning hours of autonomous operation. As **Principal AI Engineer**, you'll define how we build these systems: the architectures, the training methods, the evaluation frameworks that separate demos from deployable products.

This role is for someone who has **built the systems behind breakthroughs**—not the person who presents results, but the one who made them happen.

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### What You'll Do

**Build Frontier AI Systems**
- Define architectural patterns for training, deploying, and operating AI at scale—your decisions shape how the entire team approaches model development
- Design agent systems that decompose tasks, invoke tools (compilers, debuggers, test runners), manage state, and recover from failures across multi-hour autonomous workflows
- Architect RL pipelines with execution-based rewards (RLVR), process reward models, and self-improvement loops for code generation
- Translate cutting-edge research into production: read papers, understand the math, build systems that work at scale

**Advance Evaluation Science**
- Create evaluation frameworks that measure what actually matters—not benchmark leaderboards, but iteration efficiency, cost, reliability, and generalization to unseen codebases
- Understand why SWE-Bench scores don't tell the whole story and define what does

**Lead Technically**
- Elevate the team: mentor on ML fundamentals, debugging techniques, and the craft of building reliable AI systems
- Lead design reviews ensuring training pipelines are robust and models are production-ready
- Align AI capabilities with product needs while maintaining technical integrity

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### What You Bring

**Required (8+ years building AI that shipped)**
- **End-to-end model development:** Data pipelines → architecture design → distributed training → production serving. You've done it all.
- **Frontier systems expertise:** Transformers, large-scale training, RLHF, execution-based RL, or agent training—at a depth where you can modify and improve them
- **Production operations:** Inference optimization, model monitoring, and keeping AI reliable under real traffic
- **Engineering excellence:** Code that other engineers can maintain, debug, and extend
- **Technical leadership:** Establishing standards and making architectural decisions that last

**Strong Signals**
- Trained large models and understand the distributed systems challenges
- Built novel architectures or training methods that improved on prior art
- Debugged training instabilities or model failures that stumped everyone else
- Built agent orchestration: multi-step reasoning, tool invocation, state management across long-horizon tasks
- Worked on code understanding at repo scale—retrieval, indexing, context management, or agent memory systems
- Read full papers (not summaries) and implemented several from scratch
- Open-source work or public implementations demonstrating depth

**Paths We Value**
- Research backgrounds welcome—PhDs, research leads, or anyone who built models behind published work
- Non-traditional paths from physics, math, or quantitative fields
- Learning velocity over tenure: 8 years learning fast beats 15 years coasting
- Shipped systems over published papers

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### Who Thrives Here

- **First-principles thinkers** who debug problems rather than trying random fixes
- **Relentlessly curious** people who read papers and run experiments because they want to
- **Pragmatists** who know when to use a baseline and when to build something novel
- **Honest about uncertainty**—comfortable saying "I don't know, let me test it"

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### Why This Role?

Autonomy to make real technical decisions. Resources to execute. A team building next-generation AI agents for enterprise applications on OutSystems—people who understand what it takes to make AI actually work. No explaining why training stability matters or why you need to look at the data.

If you've been waiting for a role where your depth is valued and your judgment is trusted, this is it.
 

The Longer Story:

Working at OutSystems

Our goal is to ensure that OutSystems is a place for bright, happy, and motivated people who share a common purpose and take pride in doing excellent work to pursue our vision of providing the AI-powered low-code development platform enterprise leaders trust to build, secure, and evolve their business applications, agents, and core systems. Our culture is focused on our core values of trust, customer success, innovation, and alignment. Our team members operate with transparency, integrity, and accountability, define success through the lens of the outcomes we deliver for our customers, push the boundaries with excellence, and work together toward our shared vision to deliver on what matters most.

What do we have to offer you?

• A company that is always growing, changing, and innovating. We challenge each other to innovate in our products, in our team, and how we use our own technology. And we give our teams space to be proactive and creative.

• Real career opportunities. We care about growth and development. Yes, vertical career progression is a possibility, but it's not the only one. From lateral moves and joining different teams to mastering specialized skills, we support your growth no matter what your goals are.

• Work colleagues that are as smart, hard-working, and driven as you. We act as one global OutSystems team, taking ownership and working together toward a shared vision.

• Disrupting the status quo is in our DNA. In fact, it’s why our company exists.

• We ask “why” a lot. It helps us connect our individual work to the bigger picture and sometimes even uncover a better way.

Are you ready for the next step in your career? Then we’d love to hear from you!

OutSystems nurtures an inclusive culture of diversity, where everyone feels empowered to be their authentic self and perform at their best. A company that embraces the creativity and innovation that comes through diverse perspectives. We are committed to creating a team that reflects society through inclusive programs and initiatives and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants receive equal consideration regardless of race, place of origin, color, age, marital status, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, protected veteran status, disability status or any other status protected by law.