Research Engineer, Evals

Job description

Role At Variance, we are teaching machines to make the hardest judgment calls at scale. That means building AI agents for the high-stakes gray area of risk investigations, fraud, and identity reviews. 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. We focus on building, high-consequence systems problems where the edge cases matter most. We’re looking for a Research Engineer to help define how we measure and improve model quality. You’ll build the benchmarks, datasets, tooling, and evaluation loops that tell us whether our systems are actually getting better on the tasks that matter. This role sits at the center of research, product, and engineering. It is about creating rigorous, domain-specific evaluations that reflect real customer workflows, expose meaningful failure modes, and drive the next generation of model and agent improvements. You’re a fit if you: Care deeply about craftsmanship and have strong opinions about model quality, measurement, and experimental rigor Want to work on core model and agent behavior, not just surface-level pro...