Senior Research Engineer (AI / LLM / Cloud) – 12-Month Contract

About the Opportunity

Our client is seeking a Senior Research Engineer to join a cutting-edge research and development team focused on advancing cloud and AI technologies. This role offers the opportunity to work on next-generation AI systems, including LLM-powered agents, within a highly innovative and collaborative environment.

About the Team

The team is a Canada-based technical innovation group dedicated to building advanced cloud technologies and supporting their productization. Key focus areas include:

• Cloud-native databases
• Intelligent SQL engines
• AI and agent infrastructure
• LLM and agent evaluation technologies

The team fosters a strong research culture and collaborates closely with industry experts to develop scalable, high-performance cloud platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and develop LLM-powered AI agents for cloud services, with a focus on orchestration, robustness, and platform integration
• Translate advanced research concepts into production-ready code and scalable AI applications
• Collaborate with AI researchers and cloud engineers to design, implement, and evaluate intelligent systems
• Improve performance, reliability, and stability of agent-based workflows through rigorous testing and evaluation
• Contribute to applied research initiatives, including opportunities to publish and patent innovations

Qualifications

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related field
• Industry experience is considered an asset for PhD candidates
• Strong programming skills in Python with hands-on experience using PyTorch
• Deep understanding of:
  • Transformer architectures
  • Generative AI techniques (e.g., fine-tuning, PEFT)

Technical Skills & Experience

• Experience designing and implementing advanced orchestration frameworks such as:
  • State machines
  • Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs)
  • Multi-agent systems
• Ability to develop evaluation and benchmarking frameworks for AI agents, including:
  • Trajectory analysis
  • LLM-based evaluation methods (e.g., “LLM-as-a-judge”)
  • Custom reliability metrics

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with AI agent evaluation, observability, or monitoring tools
• Strong ability to translate complex research concepts into clean, maintainable production code

Soft Skills

• Strong communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively across teams
• Self-driven with the ability to work independently on research initiatives
• Team-oriented mindset with a focus on shared success

Additional Information

Background screening is required as part of the onboarding process. The type of screening required (criminal, credit, or other verifications) will vary based on the position and client requirements.

We use AI technology as part of our application review process to assist in screening and assessment. All applications are also reviewed by our recruitment team.