Research Engineer

About the role

About SuperAnnotate

SuperAnnotate builds the data that pushes AI forward. Frontier AI labs and leading enterprises rely on us to create, evaluate, and improve the data behind their models, across every modality and every stage of training. We blend technology, human intelligence, and operational excellence to deliver datasets that measurably move model performance. Backed by NVIDIA, Dell Technologies Capital, and Databricks, SuperAnnotate is a fast-growing Series B company at the center of the race to build frontier AI.

The Impact You'll Make

Our research team is expanding to keep pace with a wave of frontier-facing work: internal research streams, client engagements that require real ML depth, and emerging opportunities at the cutting edge of the field. As a Research Engineer, you'll take a research direction and run with it – finding the right papers, benchmarks, and prior work, reimplementing what's relevant, and building out the process to reproduce and improve on it internally.

You'll own initiatives end to end: partnering with strategic project and technical leads to scope the work, building MVPs to validate ideas (including through human annotation and agents), and turning that work into something concrete – a customer dataset, a pilot, an internal dataset that becomes a paper or blog post, or a joint publication with a partner. You won't be handed a fully specified task list; you'll be given a direction and the autonomy to turn it into a research plan.

This is a full-time, hybrid position based in San Francisco.

What You'll Do - Take a research direction and independently identify supporting resources – papers, benchmarks, blog posts – then implement or reimplement the relevant methods.

- Build and own the process to reproduce prior work internally and identify ways to improve on it.

- Own projects (for example, an RL/agentic environment build for a partner or a novel multimodal benchmark) end to end, including scoping, MVP implementation, and validation.

- Partner with strategic project leads and technical leads to translate ambiguous requirements into a concrete, testable research plan.

- Validate ideas through hands-on implementation, including annotating, evaluating, or sourcing data.

- Turn research directions into tangible outputs – a paid customer dataset, a customer pilot, an internal dataset, or a paper/blog post for publication or conference presentation.

- Bring an ML perspective to new opportunities — assessing technical feasibility of incoming requests and helping shape proposals where research depth is needed.

What You'll Bring - MS or PhD in ML, CS, or a related quantitative field – or equivalent demonstrated research experience (publications, significant open-source research work, industry research).

- Real ML depth: you understand how models are trained and evaluated, not just how to call an API. You can read a paper, judge whether its claims hold, and reimplement the method.