Early Career Research Engineer
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At a glance
Job overview
Parallel is hiring an Early Career Research Engineer. Parallel seeks an early‑career researcher‑engineer who blends theory and production, designing and training large‑scale embedding models for AI agents to retrieve web information efficiently.
Key focus areas include Design and train models powering Parallel’s APIs, Balance model expressiveness with sub‑second retrieval latency, and Maintain index freshness as the web updates.
Successful candidates bring Information Retrieval Systems, Embedding Models, and Neural Ranking. Preferred (not required): Information Retrieval Systems, Embedding Models, Neural Ranking, and Debugging Distributed Training Pipelines.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Benefits
Full job description
ABOUT US
Parallel is a web infrastructure company. Our products are used by leading businesses in sales, marketing, insurance, and coding to build best-in-class AI agents with flexible and powerful programmatic access to the web.
We've raised $230 million from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, First Round, and Terrain to build the web for AIs. We're currently valued at $2 billion and we're forming a world-class team of engineers, designers, marketers, sellers, researchers, and operational experts to achieve our mission.
ABOUT YOU
You're a researcher who thinks like an engineer, or an engineer who thinks like a researcher. You've worked on information retrieval systems, embedding models, or neural ranking at scale, or you're deeply curious about the fundamental problems that emerge when training models to understand and serve billions of web documents. You thrive in the space between theory and production, where elegant solutions must also run efficiently on real infrastructure. You're comfortable reading papers from SIGIR and RecSys one day and debugging distributed training pipelines the next.
THE ROLE
You'll design and train the models that power Parallel's APIs: the intelligence layer that helps AI agents find exactly what they need from the open web. This means tackling research problems that most labs encounter only at hyperscale: How do you train embedding models that capture semantic intent across diverse query types? How do you balance model expressiveness with sub-second retrieval latency? How do you maintain index freshness when the web updates constantly, without rebuilding from scratch?
Unlike traditional search engines built for human queries, you're building for AI agents that issue complex, multi-hop queries and expect structured, programmatic responses. This is information retrieval reimagined for the LLM era, work that combines classical IR techniques with modern deep learning, applied at a scale that demands new solutions.
LIFE AT PARALLEL
Our team works fully in-person, between our Palo Alto HQ and San Francisco office. We’re a flat, talent-dense organization dedicated to solving technical and creative problems.
We seek like-minded individuals who share our passion for applying science, creativity, and consistency to big and complex problems with equally big outcomes. These are our values:
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Own customer impact: It’s on us to ensure real-world outcomes for our customers.
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Obsess over craft: Perfect every detail because quality compounds.
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Accelerate change: Ship fast, adapt faster, and move frontier ideas into production.
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Create win-wins: Creatively turn trade-offs into upside.
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Make high-conviction bets: Try and fail. But succeed an unfair amount.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
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Competitive salary
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Generous equity
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Visa sponsorships
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401K plans
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Daily lunch & office snacks
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Dinner at the office
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Unlimited vacation
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Caltrain pass reimbursement
You've read the whole posting — now see how you match it.