# Senior Research Engineer - ML Systems - Company: [Permute]() - Location: Chicago - Team: Engineering - Employment type: Full Time - Salary: $150K – $250K - Posted: August 25, 2026 ## Job description **Senior Research Engineer – ML Systems** **Employment Type:** Full-time **Company:** Permute ([www.permute.ai](http://www.permute.ai)) ## Overview Permute is seeking a **Senior Research Engineer** to productionize, optimize, and extend the model systems that power AI reasoning over structured data. This role is for builders who can move from research ideas to reliable production systems, including the profiling, testing, and failure handling that prototypes often skip. We care as much about **how you think and build** as we do about your background. The ideal candidate can implement research, diagnose model and systems performance, write clean production code, and make sound architectural decisions in a fast-moving startup environment. ## Responsibilities * Productionize and optimize our existing **learned evidence architecture for structured data** * Improve **training and inference performance**, including throughput, latency, memory use, reliability, and cost * Port and optimize **model training and inference workloads from CPU to GPU** * Build production systems supporting **model training, evaluation, deployment, and inference** * Develop tooling for **experimentation, reproducibility, monitoring, and observability** * Write clean, maintainable **Python and PyTorch systems** that integrate with Permute's broader platform * Design and evaluate **new heads, layers, objectives, and fine-tuning methods** * Explore new model variants, including **transformer-based architectures and reinforcement learning** * Collaborate with engineering and product teams to deliver **model capabilities that power production AI features** ## Required Qualifications * Strong background in **machine learning research and ML systems** * Experience building and training models with **PyTorch** * Strong foundation in **algorithms, statistics, optimization, and experimental design** * Strong **software engineering and system architecture** skills * **5+ years building ML or performance-sensitive software systems** ## Preferred Background * Degree in **Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, or a related technical field** Experience with: * **End-to-end production ML systems** * Model **training, MLOps, evaluation, and deployment** * **Performance engineering**, including CUDA, Triton, quantization, or model compilation * **Transformers, fine-tuning, post-training, or reinforcement learning** * Meaningful contributions to **open-source ML frameworks or model implementations** ## Apply [Apply on Permute]() Canonical job page: