Lead research and engineering to train and productionize specialist foundational models for supply chain. Build large domain-specific corpora, design robust evaluation frameworks beyond standard benchmarks, iterate models and pipelines through multiple release cycles, and deliver checkpoints that run reliably in production under real customer load.
Build at Auger
Auger is the autonomous operating system for supply chains — the layer that finally allows disparate systems like ERP, WMS, and TMS to work together instead of against each other.
Most supply chain software surfaces problems and waits for a human to act. Auger solves them. Our AI detects disruptions, evaluates trade-offs, and executes decisions automatically — moving from signal to action in seconds, not weeks. We eliminate the Coordination Tax: the billions in capital and time lost when disconnected systems force the best people in the business to become the Human API between planning and execution.
At Auger, we design autonomy into our systems. We expect the same from our people.
That means:
- Clear ownership, not decision by consensus
- First principles over inherited patterns
- Shipping systems, not slide decks
- Fast feedback from reality, not opinions
If you want to build, ship, and iterate against reality, Auger is for you.
Auger was founded by Dave Clark and is backed by $150M from Oak HC/FT and Eclipse Capital. Headquarters in Dallas, TX and Bellevue, Washington.
About the Team & RoleThe core of this work is training foundational models for supply chain expertise, not wrapping a generalist frontier model in a better prompt. We think a specialist model, trained deep on the domain, beats a generalist model on the problems that actually matter here, and gets us to a level of inference speed, cost, and reliability that routing every decision through a frontier API simply can't reach.
What Makes You Succeed Here
- We'd rather see your checkpoint get quantized, distilled, and forked into someone else's production stack than see it top a leaderboard for a week and disappear. A few things from The Auger Edge show up again and again in the people who do well here.
- The instinct to Explore to Evolve looks like this in practice: you don't just call .fit() on a technique, you can derive why it works, and you'll rebuild the pipeline from the tokenizer up when the domain demands it, whether that's continued pretraining into a knowledge-intensive vertical or an eval harness that measures something real instead of something convenient.
- If you've built evaluation frameworks specifically to catch what standard benchmarks miss, you're already living Own the Fall, Rise Stronger: you treat a bad eval run as signal, not shame, and the loop from "here's where it breaks" to "here's the next checkpoint" is short.
- The field dresses complexity up as sophistication constantly, which is exactly what it means to Crush Complexity here: we want the person who ships the clean dataset and the clean eval that a teammate can pick up cold, not the clever bespoke pipeline only its author can operate.
- Tech-leading through v1, v2, v3, each release measurably stronger than the last, is what All In, All the Time looks like day to day, and it's also why your job isn't done at a passing eval or a merged PR. It's done when you've watched the checkpoint run flawlessly in production, under real load, on real customer data. Ask anyone who's been here a while what that means in practice: the job is never actually done, there's always a v4.
What You Bring
- You've built foundational training data at scale, corpora and not just models, and understand that what goes into a model matters as much as its architecture.
- You've led a project across multiple release cycles, each one measurably better than the last.
- You've designed evaluation methodology that goes beyond standard benchmarks, built specifically to surface what those benchmarks miss.
- You've adapted general purpose models to specialized, knowledge intensive domains and understand what actually transfers versus what has to be rebuilt.
- You've created datasets that other researchers and practitioners now build on.
- You've taken research past the paper and into a real, end to end system that people other than researchers actually use.
- Recognition, best paper or outstanding paper or otherwise, has followed the work, but wasn't the point of the work.
We're not hiring for a specific problem or a specific product. We're hiring for a pattern. If you read that list and thought "yes, and also," we want to talk to you.
Auger considers all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. Additionally, our privacy policy is available at https://auger.com/privacy-notice/.
Similar Jobs
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Machine Learning • Mobile • Software • Virtual Reality • App development
Lead research in user modeling and personalization, focusing on generative and language models, recommendation and retrieval systems. Build scalable prototypes, partner with engineering to deploy solutions, mentor junior researchers and interns, and publish work at top conferences.
Top Skills:
AWSAzureDistributed Multi-Node Multi-Gpu TrainingGenerative ModelsGCPInformation RetrievalLanguage ModelsPythonPyTorchRecommendation Systems
Artificial Intelligence • Computer Vision • Hardware • Robotics • Metaverse
Conduct fundamental and applied robotics research across perception, planning, control, and learning. Develop algorithms for manipulation and loco-manipulation, integrate methods into real robotic systems and simulators, publish and engage with academia, transfer research to products, collaborate across teams, and mentor interns.
Top Skills:
C++CudaIsaac LabIsaac SimJaxMujocoPythonPyTorchRosRos2Warp
Artificial Intelligence • Natural Language Processing • Generative AI
Design and run rigorous research on recruiting funnels, selection and assessment validation, and interviewer calibration. Build metrics frameworks, analytics solutions, dashboards, and presentations to inform recruiting strategy and measure impact while ensuring ethical handling of candidate data.
Top Skills:
BigQueryData VisualizationGemGreenhouseMachine LearningModern Data StackModernloopNetwork AnalysisPythonRSQL
What you need to know about the Seattle Tech Scene
Home to tech titans like Microsoft and Amazon, Seattle punches far above its weight in innovation. But its surrounding mountains, sprinkled with world-famous hiking trails and climbing routes, make the city a destination for outdoorsy types as well. Established as a logging town before shifting to shipbuilding and logistics, the Emerald City is now known for its contributions to aerospace, software, biotech and cloud computing. And its status as a thriving tech ecosystem is attracting out-of-town companies looking to establish new tech and engineering hubs.
Key Facts About Seattle Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 287,000; 13% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, software, biotechnology, game development
- Funding Landscape: $3.1 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Madrona, Fuse, Tola, Maveron
- Research Centers and Universities: University of Washington, Seattle University, Seattle Pacific University, Allen Institute for Brain Science, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle Children’s Research Institute
