Overview
The R&D Engineer is a researcher-practitioner - someone equally comfortable reading papers and shipping prototypes. They are responsible for staying close to the frontier of LLM and AI systems research, identifying ideas with practical value, and building POCs that demonstrate feasibility. These POCs are demoed to the team and, where validated, handed off to the Platform and AI Engineers to productionize. This person does not work in isolation — they collaborate closely with the rest of the team throughout the research-to-product pipeline.

What You'll Do:

• Monitor and synthesize developments in LLM systems, AI infrastructure, and adjacent research areas
• Prototype and evaluate novel ideas with a fast feedback loop — build, demo, iterate
• Extend and improve the existing agent and RAG SDKs with new retrieval strategies, agent patterns, and provider integrations
• Evaluate new embedding models, reranking approaches, and retrieval architectures against the existing pipeline
• Collaborate with the Platform and AI Engineers to hand off validated POCs
• Produce clear documentation and demos that make research accessible to non-researchers
• Contribute to discussions with the tech lead on long-term research direction and where to place technical bets
• Engage with the broader research community — conferences, papers, open-source projects
• Identify opportunities where emerging techniques can address real problems surfaced by the AI Engineer

What You Bring:

• Hands-on experience building or evaluating LLM systems — fine-tuning, inference, retrieval, or agents
• Familiarity with RAG architectures beyond naive vector search — HyDE, MMR, graph-based retrieval, reranking, or hybrid search
• Exposure to agent frameworks and multi-agent orchestration patterns (PydanticAI, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar)
• Demonstrated ability to move quickly from idea to working prototype
• A portfolio of explored ideas — published work, technical blog posts, side projects, or OSS contributions
• Strong communication skills — can explain complex research to non-researchers clearly
• Collaborative by default; understands that research value is realized when ideas ship
  • Core: Python, agent frameworks (PydanticAI or equivalent), RAG pipeline design (embedding, retrieval, reranking), managed ML platforms (Vertex AI or equivalent)
  • Nice to have: Systems-level programming experience, familiarity with inference infrastructure (vLLM, TensorRT), experience with RLHF or fine-tuning pipelines, MCP protocol, graph databases (Neo4j)

#LI-JH

#LI-Remote

Brinqa has an immediate need for a Senior Software Engineer who will be responsible for developing platform features that the Product Engineering Team will use to develop our AI features. You will need to use your expertise to ensure the features are highly scalable and performant.  Brinqa is a data processing and analytics platform that ingests, consolidates, enriches, processes, and persists hundreds of millions of vulnerabilities daily.  

The ideal candidate must have a background in providing product implementation for large-scale SaaS application development. Brinqa is seeking an engineer passionate about delivering high-quality solutions used by some of the world’s largest enterprises. The position reports to a Manager of Software Engineering or above.

If you are looking to build your career with an exceptional team, be part of building something great, and making an impact, you may have found it here at Brinqa!

 WHAT YOU WILL DO -

• Participate in the design of software products that meet our current requirements and are able to evolve as new requirements become known
• Provide technical leadership on software implementation in support of the product roadmap
• Demonstrate leadership in support of quality initiatives that achieve the expectations of prospects and maintain high renewal rates
• Champion processes that support team-led work planning, value delivery, and predictable execution
• Participate in planning sessions that ensure quality objectives are well-understood so that standards and metrics can be established
• Deliver predictable operational support for both internal and external consumers of our technologies
• Assisting in building a highly capable team based on great talent identification and recruiting
• Help ensure that the engineering team is happy, prolific, and autonomous
• Maximize the productivity of our technologies by assisting in the development of technical documentation

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

• 5+ years of experience in building large-scale SaaS applications
• 3+ years of experience in SaaS Java/Groovy enterprise web application development
• 3+ years of experience in Spring Boot
• Experience using generative AI including LLM's and vector embeddings.
• Experience in developing web-scale applications
• Experience working with REST APIs
• Ability to work in all areas of the tech stack (“Full-Stack Engineer”)
• Understanding of Agile Scrum methodologies
• Significant work experience in enterprise IT systems management applications
• Experience in technical team leadership
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering is preferred

AND IDEALLY

• Experience developing applications that leverage AI technologies (e.g., ML, Generative AI, NLP, etc.)
• Experience with MCP and agentic AI architectures
• Experience with analytical AI; training classification models or auto-encoders.
• Experience working with Neo4J or Yugabyte
• Experience developing cybersecurity or IT systems management applications
• Master’s or Advanced Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline