Research Engineer, Judgment Systems

Responsibilities

• Train, fine-tune, and improve models for fraud, scams, abuse, and other high-stakes judgment workflows
• Own research threads focused on improving agent capability, reliability, and decision quality
• Build proprietary benchmarks, datasets, and evals that reflect real customer workflows and regulatory constraints
• Design and run experiments across post-training, retrieval, tool use, planning, memory, and long-horizon agent behavior
• Study model failure modes and prototype new training strategies or agent architectures
• Translate research advances into deployed product capabilities

Requirements

• Experience training, fine-tuning, or evaluating modern ML systems
• Strong programming skills and comfort working in research-heavy codebases
• Familiarity with LLMs, agent systems, post-training, reinforcement learning, or retrieval
• Ability to design clean experiments and draw reliable conclusions from noisy results
• Strong engineering judgment and a bias toward building
• Interest in fraud, risk, trust and safety, or compliance domains

Benefits

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity
• Platinum-level medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO, sick leave, and parental leave
• Up to $100 per month in reimbursement for personal health and wellness expenses
• 401(k) plan

About the Company

Variance builds AI agents for the high-precision gray area of stopping fraud, scams, and abuse. We are a small, talent-dense team in San Francisco working on making AI systems work in adversarial, regulated, and high-consequence settings.