About this role
Summary: The Senior Applied Researcher leads the design, evaluation, and shipping of AI-powered conversational agents at production scale. This role involves partnering with the Applied Research Team Lead to define technical standards, assess AI tools, and build shared tooling while operating within current infrastructure co...
About the Role
At Second Nature AI, we're building a cutting-edge, AI-powered conversation platform that lives in the browser, real-time audio, WebSockets, and everything that comes with it. We're looking for a Senior Applied Researcher and Team Lead to help shape how our conversational agents are designed, evaluated, and shipped reliably at production scale.
Key Responsibilities
- Partner directly with the Applied Research Team Lead to define and evolve team process, technical standards, and the quality bar for agent behavior.
- Take real user experience and data through the full arc, from concept to a reliable agent design to a shipped, production-grade product.
- Own or share ownership of the standing function of assessing AI tools, models, and providers for reliability and fit.
- Raise the technical bar across a team spanning research-leaning grad students to engineers newer to AI, and turn personal expertise into shared tooling and standards the whole team can use.
- Operate pragmatically inside current infrastructure constraints while flagging where structural fixes are needed.
- Strong applied research background (NLP/ML) with real production experience, shipped systems, not only research output.
- Fluency in the modern stack: context engineering, agent design and orchestration, and evaluation of LLM-based systems.
- An execution and operations mindset, biased to ship, comfortable defining good enough versus chasing optimal.
- A track record of building standards or tooling that lifts a whole team, or clear readiness to grow into that.
- Comfortable owning ambiguous problems end to end with minimal oversight.
Bonus Points
- Experience on another applied-research or agent team, bringing outside benchmarks and practices in.