- Location
- Palo Alto, United States · Onsite
- Compensation
- $600k – $680k • No equity
- Employment
- Full-time
- Experience level
- MID (2–5 years exp)
- Specialization
- Research Scientist, Scientist, Wellfound
- Source
- Wellfound
ML/Applied Research Scientist
About CHAI AI
CHAI is a social AI platform where millions of people create, share, and talk to AI characters. As of Sep 2026, it has 10 million active users and $100 million ARR. After receiving over $55M in funding from investors such as AMD and CoreWeave, CHAI AI is actively hiring engineers to expand its team.
About the team
Engineering is 15–20 people with a flat structure. High impact on the product, fast iteration, and clear metrics to measure against.
What you will work on
Own the research agenda for model training and evaluation — new training objectives, new eval metrics — and connect them directly to revenue.
You might thrive in this role if you…
(minimum/Preferred requirements)
- 2+ years of software engineering experience
- High motivation and talented.
- High ownership: comfortable with ambiguity, able to define the problem and the plan rather than execute a predefined spec.
- Able to work in person at our Palo Alto Office.
Compensation and benefits
Top pay AI startup in Bay Area. $600,000 – $750,000, paid 100% in cash.
We benchmark against total comp at Meta, Google, and OpenAI — and pay that number in cash, not equity, with the option to trade a portion of cash for stock options.
Health, 401k, unlimited PTO.
Our interview process
We run a fast process - an offer can be given within 7 days of first contact.
- 20 minute phone screen with our founder or engineer
- 20 minute personality assessment
- Take home assessment. 60-90 minutes to complete.
- One day onsite interview.