Founding Applied Research Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 17, 2026. First seen by Alion on May 28, 2026. Rox scores A on the Alion truth index.
About Us
At Rox, we believe in empowering people to do their best work.
Our platform supercharges sellers with autonomous revenue agents to do the manual work so they can focus on what they do best: selling. Just as coding agents 10x’d engineering, revenue agents 10x customer work.
We are reimagining the revenue stack by building the world’s first revenue operating system, from the application layer to the system of context. With Rox, humans are evolving to orchestrators while agents manage the end-to-end customer lifecycle.
Rox powers Global 2000 leaders in banking, hardware, construction, and sovereign AI, while serving dominant AI winners like Ramp and Cognition.
Underlying all of this success is an unwavering, shared belief in the mission, with an unreasonable commitment of doing whatever it takes to make it a reality.
The Team
Nothing is possible without the world-class team, assembled to redefine how businesses operate.
Members on our team have:
Founded and exited successful companies
Held the highest positions at Google, AWS, Confluent, and New Relic
Won IMO and IOI gold medals
Published field-defining papers
We’re backed by the best, including Sequoia, General Catalyst, Google Ventures, Elad Gil, and Chris Ré.
Core Principles
Taste: Craft beautiful experiences.
No matter how small, we strive to make sure every detail is right. We care deeply about every interaction, both in terms of whether it helps the seller get the job done, but also how the product makes them feel. We get a visceral feeling when something is off and stop at nothing to make sure we make it right. We never settle, continuously exploring ways to delight sellers.
Obsession: Commit unreasonably.
In all aspects of our craft, we commit. We not only are immediately reactive to customers’ requests but are proactive about driving value even before they ask. We are also obsessive about always learning and honing our craft, improving ourselves and product every single day.
Action: Get it done.
Talking is easy but the difference comes from the execution. We lean heavily towards making thoughtful yet fast decisions and delivering immediately. We play in a field where trust is paramount. We earn the trust and right to empower the best sellers by forging a history of over-delivering on the promise at record speed.
Your Role
Why This Role Exists
Foundation models are commoditizing. Defensibility comes from specialized models, proprietary training signals, and evaluation ownership. Every applied AI company we benchmark against like Decagon, Harvey, Sierra, Cursor has already moved. The window to claim frontier applied AI for revenue is closing in the next few months.
Rox is in market. We run agents against enterprise data at scale, every day. We see exactly where research meets production and where the data is dirty, state is changing, and being wrong costs (a lot of) money. The Applied Research team exists to close that gap permanently.
What This Team Works On
Four problems we care about right now:
Cost-efficient inference for Clever Columns. Distill a Rox-trained model from frontier teachers so per-account enrichment runs at 1/20th the cost without quality loss. Ships first. Doesn't require trajectory attribution.
Signal classification across the public knowledge graph. A small, fast classifier that distinguishes genuine buying signals from noise across the news, jobs, and filings corpus we already ingest at scale. Powers Recommended Next Moves and Auto Prospecting. Cleanest data subset.
Personalization grounding and hallucination detection. A reward model that catches fabricated prospect context in Sequences in real time. This is the most underrated production failure mode in outbound AI. Trained on cross-customer consensus edits.
Sequencing policy under sparse, delayed rewards. Offline-to-online RL on multi-touch trajectories with intermediate signals as proxies for terminal outcomes. Long-horizon flagship. Hard.
These are not benchmark problems. They have real SLAs and real customers depending on them.
Why Join Now
We are at an unusual moment. Large enough to have real scale, real customers, and genuinely interesting research problems. Small enough that you are one of a handful of people shaping what the Applied Research function looks like and what it prioritizes.
The team is extraordinary: IMO, IOI, and ICPC medalists, researchers from DeepMind and OpenAI. The feedback loop is a live enterprise system, not a leaderboard. If that's not more interesting to you than publishing for the sake of publishing, this probably isn't the right fit.
San Francisco, onsite. We relocate exceptional people.
Responsibilities
Design and run research programs tied directly to the four above.
Build evaluation frameworks that measure trajectory quality, not just final output, because most eval infrastructure measures end results and we care about the path.
Work on agent memory, retrieval, and context systems alongside elite and competitive engineering minds.
Translate findings into infrastructure with measurable production impact. Help define where Rox Research goes next.
What Success Looks Like
First few weeks: you understand Rox's architecture, where the production problems are, and where the research gaps are. You have opinions and you share them.
First few months: you are running experiments that directly inform how we build. Something you worked on is in production.
Over time: you are defining the research agenda for the most interesting applied AI problem in the enterprise. The systems you build are things no one else has built before, because no one else has the structural data position to build them.
Qualifications
You have spent real time thinking about how agents fail in practice, not just on benchmarks. You have built evaluation systems and know exactly where standard approaches break down. You can write code well enough to implement your own ideas, run your own experiments, and ship things that make it into production.
You move fast. The environment changes monthly and the team ships continuously.
Particularly relevant: agent evaluation and behavioral benchmarking; retrieval-augmented generation and knowledge graph systems; RL applied to real-world agent behavior; production ML systems (latency, reliability, observability); post-training and model adaptation for production use cases.
A PhD is not required. Strong research instincts and the ability to ship are.
Benefits
Medical, dental, and vision, including 100% company-paid plans for you and eligible dependents
Company-paid life & AD&D, plus short- and long-term disability
401(k) with automatic enrollment
Unlimited PTO, plus paid sick leave, company holidays, and bereavement
Up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave at 100% pay (birth, adoption, or foster)
Wellness stipend: $375/quarter
Learning stipend: up to $2,000/year
Internet & cell phone stipend: $25/month
Mental health support, virtual care, and care navigation
Fertility & family-building support, plus backup care membership
Pre-tax commuter benefits (transit & parking)
SF HQ: daily catered breakfast & lunch, meal allowances, and rideshare support when commuting to the office
Apply
To apply, please fill out the application form. We're looking forward to connecting with you!