---
title: 'Lead Research Engineer at Atla'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-research-engineer-atla-london-qv6gw65pjyfs'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Lead Research Engineer at Atla

- **Company:** Atla
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2024-12-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/atla-ai-com/am9icG9zdDqPI_BftFoQspU3BVKGREm2

## Job description

## About Atla

Atla is committed to engineering safe, beneficial AI systems that will have a massive positive impact on the future of humanity. We are a London-based start-up building the most capable AI evaluation models. Become part of our growing world-class team, backed by Y Combinator, Creandum, and the founders of Reddit, Cruise, Rappi, Instacart and more.

## Role

As Atla’s Lead Research Engineer, you’ll lead frontier research into training large language models, and advance the state of the art in AI safety research. As part of your role, you will:

- Steer LLMs to become strong evaluators aligned with human preferences using advanced post-training techniques.
- Define and execute an ambitious research agenda that advances Atla's position as a leader in language model evaluation.
- Develop comprehensive evaluation frameworks, including tooling, datasets and metrics for rigorous assessment of alignment and safety risks.
- Contribute significant findings to leading AI safety conferences and journals.

Please note that this role is in-person (we can sponsor visas and offer international relocation support as a [UK AI Futures](https://www.great.gov.uk/campaign-site/ai-futures/) partner!)

## Qualifications

Proven AI research leadership:

- Track record of 5+ years in pioneering AI research, with significant contributions to the field of LLMs, evidenced by publications in top-tier conferences and journals.
- Proven experience in defining and executing research agendas, demonstrating the ability to guide and align a team toward achieving ambitious research goals.
- Deep expertise in training and evaluating language models across GPUs, preferably in PyTorch.
- Experience at elite AI research lab (OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic, Cohere, etc.).

## Nice to have

- Experience at a fast growing startup.
- Strong software, ML engineering expertise with a focus on building robust, scalable system.

## About you

You'll work by and thrive through our core principles: Own the Outcome

- Create real value: Every action should deliver tangible, meaningful value for the people who use what we build.
- Drive to completion: Do the second 90%.
- Do fewer things, better: Prioritize focus over breadth. Back the Team
- Collaborate for excellence: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
- Seek truth: Let the best ideas win, no matter where they come from, and let go of ego.
- Argue passionately, then commit fully: Debate fiercely, but once a decision is made, own it like it’s yours. Drive the Mission
- Advance AI safety: Every action should contribute towards the safe development of AI.
- Go big or go home: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

## Compensation

- £200K - £300K
- Significant stake in equity as one of our core technical leaders
- Pension plan with employer contributions
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Join our driven founding team to make a dent in the universe by engineering safe, beneficial AI systems!

“This role is supported by [AI Futures Grants](https://www.great.gov.uk/campaign-site/ai-futures/), a UK Government scheme designed to help the next generation of AI leaders meet the costs of relocating to the UK. AI Futures Grants provide financial support to reimburse relocation costs such as visa fees, the immigration health surcharge and travel/subsistence expenses. Successful candidates for this role may be able to get up to £10,000 to meet relocations costs, subject to terms and conditions.”

## About Atla

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Atla provides an evaluation and improvement platform for AI agents, helping developers automatically detect, diagnose, and fix critical failures.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed Stage)
- **Headquarters**: London, England, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Roman Engeler (co-founder & CTO) and others (names not publicly disclosed for all co-founders)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI evaluation & observability, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), Developer Tools
- **Target customers**: B2B – engineering teams building and deploying AI agents (startups to enterprises)
- **Mission**: Turn agent noise into actionable insights so teams can ship reliable AI systems with confidence.

## Products & Services
- **Atla Platform**: A SaaS platform that ingests agent traces and uses proprietary LLM Judges (Selene and Selene Mini) to automatically flag errors at the step level, cluster recurring failures into patterns, and generate specific, code-level suggestions for fixes. Supports popular agent frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents) and integrates with existing stacks via API.
- **Selene & Selene Mini (Open-Source)**: Purpose-built LLM Judges for evaluating agent performance; downloaded 40,000+ times (as of late 2025), 60,000+ times (as of early 2026) [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/atla).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company).
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – USD 5.125 million across two seed rounds (June 2023: $125K; December 2023: $5M led by Creandum) [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/atla-ai).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (S23 batch), Creandum, plus angel investors including founders of Reddit, Cruise, Rappi, Instacart [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/atla-ai).
- **Growth Signals**: Open-source LLM Judges have seen strong community adoption (60k+ downloads); early customer traction includes a legal AI startup used in 15+ countries and a fast-growing productivity AI startup that doubled improvement shipping speed [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/atla); workforce is lean but globally distributed (UK, US, Switzerland).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep evaluation focus**: Unlike generic monitoring tools, Atla uses specialized LLM Judges (trained specifically for agent evaluation) to identify root causes rather than just surfacing raw traces.
- **Actionable suggestions**: The platform doesn’t stop at detection – it recommends concrete code-level fixes, reducing debugging time from days to hours.
- **Open-source credibility**: Releasing Selene models builds trust and community, while also serving as a lead generation channel.
- **YC and top-tier investor backing**: Accelerator and venture support from Creandum and prominent founders signals market validation.

## Strategic Focus
- **Product development**: Continue improving pattern detection accuracy and expanding support for more agent frameworks and deployment environments.
- **Scaling adoption**: Targeting teams building complex agentic systems who are frustrated with manual trace review. Likely moving toward enterprise-grade features (role-based access, compliance, advanced integrations).
- **Community building**: Leveraging open-source judges to attract developers and create a feedback loop that improves model performance.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Small, highly technical team of AI researchers, engineers, and operational leaders. Emphasis on autonomy and impact – employees own significant parts of the product [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/atla).
- **Work environment**: On-site in London (HQ) with remote presence in the US and Switzerland [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/atla). Likely hybrid flexibility given global team.
- **Notable perks/engineering culture**: Deep technical challenge in AI evaluation; opportunity to shape the nascent category of agent reliability. Open-source contributions and research publications are part of the culture.
- **Growth trajectory**: Early-stage startup with strong investor backing and clear product-market fit signal – suitable for those who thrive in high-ownership, fast-paced environments.

## Sources
1. [atla-ai.com](https://atla-ai.com/?stream=top)
2. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/atla-ai)
3. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/atla)
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/atla)

## Other roles at Atla

- [Product Engineer (Frontend)](https://feeny.ai/job/product-engineer-frontend-atla-london-a9r5k99n5kmn) — London, United Kingdom
- [Research Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/research-intern-atla-london-jb06413zrkja) — London, United Kingdom
- [Chief Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/chief-scientist-atla-london-x5w01m9bdgys) — London, United Kingdom