AI Research Engineer (Early Career)

# AI Research Engineer (Early Career) Applied ML / LLM / Agentic Systems Remote (EU/US timezones) | Full-Time | Entry-Level Company: Pergola Studio --- ## About the Role Pergola Studio's AlpacaRelay is building next-generation AI platforms — efficient, vertically specialized models that power real marketing and SEO products used by real customers. We're looking for a sharp, curious ML engineer who is early in their career (recent grad or 0-2 years of experience) but already thinks like a systems architect: someone who wants to go deep on how LLMs, RAG pipelines, and AI agents actually work in production, not just call an API. You'll work directly with our engineering team on real product surfaces — building and iterating on agentic workflows, retrieval systems, and model integrations that ship to customers. This isn't a research-only role sitting in a notebook: you'll own pieces of the stack end to end, from prototype to deployment, and get mentored on the production-engineering muscle that most new grads don't get exposed to. We care more about how you think and how fast you learn than your years of experience. If you graduated from a strong CS/ML program, have built real things (side projects, research code, competition entries), and want to work at the frontier of applied AI with a small, high-leverage team — we want to hear from you. ## What You'll Do - Build and iterate on agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines, and LLM integrations that ship into production - Work directly with senior engineers on architecture and design decisions, not just implementation - Take ownership of well-scoped pieces of the stack — from prototype through deployment and monitoring - Contribute to evaluation and testing of model behavior, prompts, and retrieval quality - Learn production ML engineering practices — versioning, observability, cost/latency tradeoffs — through direct mentorship ## Who You Are - Recent graduate or early-career engineer (0-2 years) from a strong CS, Math, or ML program - Solid software engineering fundamentals — you write production-quality code, not just notebooks - Genuinely curious about how LLMs, RAG, and AI agents work under the hood - Comfortable being self-directed in a small, fast-moving, fully remote team - Strong written communicator — async, remote-first collaboration is the default here