[Hiring] Research Engineer @Orbis

Role Description

Lead applied research in one or more Orbis AI focus areas — agentic AI, knowledge representation, dynamic ontologies, autonomous analysis, and high-performance analytics — and carry the results into the product. You will frame the problem, survey what already exists, build prototypes that test a real hypothesis, and measure honestly enough to act on the answer. The role exists because our advantage comes from turning advanced research into dependable mission capability.

Travel: Up to 20% for conferences, customer engagement, and team collaboration.

Key Responsibilities

• Frame research problems drawn from real product and mission gaps, define what a result must show to be worth productizing, and survey existing work before building.
• Build prototypes that isolate the question being asked, at the fidelity the question actually requires.
• Run rigorous experiments — baselines, ablations, held-out evaluation, and honest error analysis — with methodology another engineer can reproduce.
• Build and maintain the datasets and evaluation harnesses your area depends on, including cases that capture known failure modes.
• Report results clearly, negative results included, and make a defensible recommendation to continue, pivot, or stop.
• Transition validated results into production alongside product engineers, staying involved through the handoff rather than delivering a notebook.
• Contribute to the scientific community through publications, open-source releases, and academic collaborations, and advise Orbis on what in the field is worth adopting.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of applied research or research-engineering experience, or an M.S./Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field with equivalent applied work.
• Strong Python engineering skills, producing research code another engineer can read, run, and build on.
• Demonstrated experience designing and running experiments that produced an actionable conclusion, with methodology you can defend.
• Depth in at least one Orbis AI focus area: agentic AI, knowledge representation, dynamic ontologies, autonomous analysis, or high-performance analytics.
• Working knowledge of modern LLM and retrieval methods and their practical limitations.
• Clear technical writing that makes a result legible to engineers and non-specialist stakeholders alike.
• Willingness to travel up to 20%.

Desired Qualifications

• Publication record, open-source contributions, or academic collaborations in a relevant area.
• Experience carrying a research result all the way into a production system.
• Experience with knowledge graphs, ontology engineering, reasoning systems, or information extraction.
• Experience with agent architectures, planning, or multi-agent coordination.
• Experience with model training, fine-tuning, or evaluation at scale.
• Experience with performance engineering on data-intensive or analytical workloads.
• Familiarity with OSINT, intelligence, or investigative research workflows.

Physical Requirements

• Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
• Participation in virtual and in-person meetings.
• Ability to attend planned meetings and/or work in classified spaces for extended periods within the specified work regions.

Travel

Up to 20% for conferences, customer engagement, and team collaboration.

Benefits

Beyond the opportunity to work alongside practitioners who have operated at the mission edge, joining Orbis means real ownership over outcomes that matter; the chance to build technology that gives the United States Government and its allies a genuine decision advantage, not just another dashboard. From competitive retirement matching to a PTO policy that encourages real time off, we're committed to creating an environment where our team can do their best work and still have a life outside of it.

Our comprehensive benefits package is designed to meet the diverse needs of our employees and their families. A full list of benefits is shared with candidates following an initial conversation with our HR team, so you'll have a clear picture of the support and resources available to you as part of the Orbis team.