Variance

Variance

Research Engineer, Judgment Systems

San Francisco

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 113 days ago
Machine LearningLLMsAgentic AICustomer SupportResearch

About the role

  • This isn't another sales tool or a customer service system.
  • We're solving real problems in investigations and fraud prevention to protect innocent people from being harmed.
  • We're a small, talent-dense team in San Francisco working on a problem at the edge of what AI systems can reliably do: making good decisions in messy, adversarial, real-world environments.

Responsibilities

  • Own research threads focused on improving agent capability, reliability, and decision quality
  • Build proprietary benchmarks, datasets, and evals that reflect real customer workflows, regulatory constraints, and real failure modes
  • Design and run experiments across post-training, retrieval, tool use, planning, memory, and long-horizon agent behavior
  • We develop evals and training loops that compound over time
  • Ability to design clean experiments and draw reliable conclusions from noisy results
  • Strong engineering judgment and a bias toward building
  • We enjoy spirited debate, wild ideas, and building things we're proud of.
  • We build AI agents for the high-precision gray area of stopping fraud, scams, and abuse.

Nice to have

  • Preferred background

Compensation

  • Competitive salary and meaningful equity

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
  • Familiarity with LLMs, agent systems, post-training, reinforcement learning, retrieval, or adjacent areas

Company info

  • At Variance, we are teaching machines to make the hardest judgment calls at scale.

This listing is sourced directly from Variance's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.