Deep Learning Research Engineer

HackerRank helps companies like NVIDIA, Amazon, and Microsoft hire and upskill the next generation of developers based on skills, not pedigree. Our platform is trusted by over 2,500 of the world's most innovative companies to build strong engineering teams ready for what's next.

Software has entered an era where humans and AI build side by side. As this shift accelerates, the definition of strong technical talent is changing. We give companies better ways to identify and invest in next-generation skills.

People at HackerRank care deeply about the impact of their work and sweat the small details so our customers can be wildly successful with products they genuinely love to use. We move with urgency and believe great outcomes come from high standards.

About the role:

Hiring is one of the most consequential decisions a company makes. 3,000+ enterprises rely on HackerRank to get it right. We are now reinventing how that works for the agentic era. The AI/ML systems that power this platform are not auxiliary features. They are the product.

Open Problems:

The agentic era is reshaping every layer of the hiring stack. These are some of the core problems you'll be working across, none of them fully solved.

• Chakra: Building an autonomous AI interviewer that conducts, adapts to, and evaluates technical interviews end to end.
• Integrity: Detecting fraud and suspicious behavior across multiple signal types. The ways candidates game assessments change frequently, and the models need to keep up.
• Evaluation: Measuring technical skill in a world where AI writes the code. The old proxies no longer hold and the new ones have not been defined yet.

Your focus will shift across these depending on where the highest-leverage work is at any given time.

What you will do:

• Research, Design, and Develop advanced Deep Learning models and novel Neural architectures.
• Explore architectures beyond Transformers, including State Space Models (SSMs), Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs), and Hybrid approaches.
• Design and implement Agentic AI systems, Recursive Reasoning Engines, and tool-augmented architectures.
• Fine-tuning of models using PEFT (e.g. LoRA, QLoRA etc.), and Knowledge Distillation.
• Optimize model Performance, Inference Efficiency, Latency, and Memory utilization.
• Design rigorous experiments, evaluation frameworks, and benchmarks to validate research hypotheses.
• Translate cutting-edge research into scalable, production-grade AI systems.

Who you are:

• M.Tech./M.S./Ph.D. in AI/ML or related disciplines, preferably from a Tier 1 premier Research Institution.
• 2–3 years of experience in Deep Learning, Machine Learning, or Applied AI Research.
• Strong foundations in Linear Algebra, Probability, Statistics, Optimization, and Deep Learning algorithms.
• Proficient in frameworks like PyTorch/JAX, with hands-on model development experience.
• Demonstrated ability to implement, reproduce, and extend research papers, including building neural architectures from scratch.
• Familiarity with distributed computing, GPU acceleration, and scalable ML infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of experimental design, model evaluation, benchmarking, and statistical validation.
• Demonstrated research aptitude through publications, open-source contributions etc.

Even better if you have:

• Publications at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL) or notable open-source contributions in model architectures or agentic systems.
• Experience with LLM evaluation, fraud or anomaly detection, or building systems where the "ground truth" is still being defined.
• Hands-on work taking models from research into low-latency, production inference, such as quantization, distillation, or serving optimization.

You will thrive here if you:

• You enjoy solving open-ended research problems and challenging established assumptions.
• You prefer first-principles thinking and rigorous experimentation over simply applying existing models.
• You are excited to explore next-generation AI architectures beyond traditional Transformers.
• You thrive in a fast-paced environment with intellectual freedom, ownership, and direct collaboration with leadership.
• You are passionate about turning novel AI research into efficient, scalable, real-world systems.