CosmicLabs-HQ/ML-Researcher-Applied

Cosmic Labs
Cosmic Labs

Software Engineering, Data Science

Posted on Jul 15, 2026

ML-Researcher-Applied

Location: In-person, San Francisco (Relocation Supported) Type: Full-time | Competitive Pay + Equity Start Date: ASAP

You will:

  • Design agent architectures that reason over technical data and take structured actions
  • Build the harnesses that run those agents
  • Own evaluation methodology
  • Research prompting, fine-tuning, and post-training approaches for reasoning over dense structured technical data
  • Study the failure modes of agentic systems in high-stakes deployment settings and design mitigations for them
  • Develop calibration and confidence estimation methods so agents know when to act and when to escalate to a human operator
  • Publish internal results that other engineers can read, reproduce, and build on
  • Shape the research direction of the ML function and, over time, grow and lead a small team

What You Bring

  • 4+ years of experience in applied ML, ML research, or a research-heavy engineering role
  • Deep fluency with modern language models, agent design, and post-training methods
  • Experience building evaluation infrastructure for open-ended tasks where standard benchmarks do not apply
  • The judgment to know when an evaluation is telling you something real about production behavior versus when a number moved for reasons that will not hold up
  • Ability to work independently on open-ended research problems and communicate findings clearly to engineers who are not ML specialists
  • Comfort operating in a domain where the data, the tools, and the evaluation methodology all need to be built
  • Prior work on agent harnesses, tool use, or long-horizon reasoning
  • Publications or open-source work in LLM evaluation, agent research, or applied ML

How to Apply

Email the following to team@cosmiclabs.io:

Subject line: ML Researcher, Applied ML / [Your Name]

In the body:

  • Your name
  • Why this role and why Cosmic Labs
  • What you bring technically
  • Soonest available start date
  • Education and years of experience
  • U.S. work eligibility status
  • Availability (dates and times) for a 15-minute phone call over the next seven days

Attachment:

  • PDF resume

Applications reviewed on a rolling basis.