Early Career Research Engineer

parallelΒ· Engineering
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πŸ“ Palo AltoFullTimeπŸ’° USD 150K–300K/yr

About this role

About us

Parallel is a web infrastructure company. Our products are used by leading businesses in sales, marketing, insurance, and coding to build best-in-class AI agents with flexible and powerful programmatic access to the web.

We've raised $230 million from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, First Round, and Terrain to build the web for AIs. We're currently valued at $2 billion and we're forming a world-class team of engineers, designers, marketers, sellers, researchers, and operational experts to achieve our mission.

About you

You're a researcher who thinks like an engineer, or an engineer who thinks like a researcher. You've worked on information retrieval systems, embedding models, or neural ranking at scale, or you're deeply curious about the fundamental problems that emerge when training models to understand and serve billions of web documents. You thrive in the space between theory and production, where elegant solutions must also run efficiently on real infrastructure. You're comfortable reading papers from SIGIR and RecSys one day and debugging distributed training pipelines the next.

The role

You'll design and train the models that power Parallel's APIs: the intelligence layer that helps AI agents find exactly what they need from the open web. This means tackling research problems that most labs encounter only at hyperscale: How do you train embedding models that capture semantic intent across diverse query types? How do you balance model expressiveness with sub-second retrieval latency? How do you maintain index freshness when the web updates constantly, without rebuilding from scratch?

Unlike traditional search engines built for human queries, you're building for AI agents that issue complex, multi-hop queries and expect structured, programmatic responses. This is information retrieval reimagined for the LLM era, work that combines classical IR techniques with modern deep learning, applied at a scale that demands new solutions.

Life at Parallel

Our team works fully in-person, between our Palo Alto HQ and San Francisco office. We’re a flat, talent-dense organization dedicated to solving technical and creative problems.

We seek like-minded individuals who share our passion for applying science, creativity, and consistency to big and complex problems with equally big outcomes. These are our values:

  • Own customer impact: It’s on us to ensure real-world outcomes for our customers.

  • Obsess over craft: Perfect every detail because quality compounds.

  • Accelerate change: Ship fast, adapt faster, and move frontier ideas into production.

  • Create win-wins: Creatively turn trade-offs into upside.

  • Make high-conviction bets: Try and fail. But succeed an unfair amount.

Compensation & benefits

  • Competitive salary

  • Generous equity

  • Visa sponsorships

  • 401K plans

  • Daily lunch & office snacks

  • Dinner at the office

  • Unlimited vacation

  • Caltrain pass reimbursement

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the salary for the Early Career Research Engineer role at parallel?
The listed salary for this Early Career Research Engineer position at parallel is USD 150K–300K/yr. This is an FullTime role.
Where is the Early Career Research Engineer position at parallel located?
This Early Career Research Engineer role at parallel is based in Palo Alto. The position is listed as on-site or hybrid. Check the full job description or apply directly to confirm the work arrangement.
Is the Early Career Research Engineer role at parallel full-time or part-time?
This is listed as a FullTime position. It is posted as a Early Career Research Engineer role in the Engineering department at parallel.
Which team or department does the Early Career Research Engineer at parallel belong to?
This Early Career Research Engineer position is part of the Engineering department at parallel. See the full job description for more information about the team structure and responsibilities.
How do I apply for the Early Career Research Engineer position at parallel?
Click the "Apply Now" button on this page. You will be redirected to parallel's official application portal hosted on ashby where you can submit your application directly.
When was the Early Career Research Engineer job at parallel posted?
This Early Career Research Engineer position at parallel was posted on Jan 24, 2026. Apply as soon as possible β€” early applications are often reviewed first.
Early Career Research Engineer
parallel Β· πŸ’° USD 150K–300K/yr
Apply for this role β†—

You'll be redirected to parallel's official application page on Ashby ATS.