---
title: 'Research Engineer, Applied AI at HeyMilo'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-applied-ai-heymilo-colombo-v6e0ak4ka5gd'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Research Engineer, Applied AI at HeyMilo

- **Company:** HeyMilo
- **Location:** Colombo, Sri Lanka
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/heymilo/afe7f80e-e7a3-47f7-9669-19bee25245bc

## Job description

HeyMilo is building AI interviewers that automate and improve hiring through conversational AI. We work closely with companies to bring AI into real hiring workflows. We also run an applied AI team that studies where our proprietary models succeed and fail.

## THE ROLE

We're hiring a Research Engineer to join our Applied AI team in Colombo, focused on HR and recruiting. You'll design and build reinforcement learning environments with verifiable rewards for real workflows across the HR/recruiting stack: sourcing, screening, scheduling, applicant tracking systems, and the systems of record around them. You'll build the simulators, reward functions, and evaluation harnesses that show where models succeed and fail across this stack, and that let us improve them.

The work is equal parts ML research and systems engineering. You'll take a workflow from problem definition to a reproducible environment that models can be evaluated and trained against.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Design and build RL environments for HR and recruiting workflows: realistic simulators of candidates, recruiters, and ATS platforms, tool interfaces, and episodic task generation with proper isolation and reproducibility
- Evaluate where models succeed and fail across the HR/recruiting stack, from multi-step recruiter workflows to integrations and record matching across systems
- Design verifiable reward functions that score correct intermediate actions as well as end states, and hold up against reward hacking
- Build and maintain evaluation harnesses that run task suites across frontier and open-weight models, with clean scoring and cost tracking
- Run post-training experiments (e.g. RLVR-style fine-tuning of open models) to validate that your environments produce a learnable signal
- Package environments and results for reproducibility, and contribute to research write-ups and published evaluations
- Collaborate with analysts who author tasks and rubrics, turning their ground truth into running environments

## WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- PhD in AI, Machine Learning, or a closely related field (required)
- Solid grounding in reinforcement learning and LLM post-training (reward design, policy optimization, evaluation methodology)
- Strong software engineering skills in Python, with code that others can run and build on
- Hands-on experience with LLMs: running evaluations, building agentic loops, tool calling, fine-tuning
- Comfortable with containers and infrastructure (Docker, Linux, cloud environments) for reproducible experiment setups
- Ability to operate in ambiguity and move quickly; comfortable owning a problem end to end

## BONUS

- Published research or open-source contributions in ML, RL, or evaluation
- Experience with RL/eval frameworks and simulated or sandboxed environments
- Experience training or fine-tuning open-weight models at any scale
- Familiarity with HR tech: applicant tracking systems, recruiting workflows, or staffing operations

## WHY JOIN

- Ground-floor role on a new applied AI team with real influence over how we build
- Work reviewed by and published alongside experienced researchers
- High visibility, fast-paced, execution-driven environment
- Competitive pay and benefits

## About HeyMilo

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: HeyMilo provides an AI-powered voice and video agent that automates candidate screening and interviewing for high-volume hiring teams.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; raised $6M total)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, USA
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Sabashan Ragavan (Co-Founder & CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI recruiting / HR technology
- **Target customers**: B2B – staffing firms, enterprises, franchises, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) firms, and any organization with high-volume hiring needs
- **Mission or purpose**: To fix high-volume hiring by giving employers a faster, fairer, and more consistent way to screen and evaluate every candidate, regardless of background.

## Products & Services
- **AI Interviewer (Voice & Video)**: A conversational AI agent that conducts live interviews, asks follow-ups, and evaluates candidates using customizable rubrics. Supports 17+ languages. (SaaS)
- **Pre-Screening Control**: Configurable eligibility checks, resume screening, and form-based screening to surface best-fit candidates. (SaaS)
- **Candidate Sourcing**: Integrates with ATS and other data sources to pipe in and rank candidates. (SaaS)
- **Insights & Analytics**: Collects structured interview data, tracks performance trends, and feeds insights back into the ATS. (SaaS)
- **Notetaker**: Captures structured notes from recruiter-led interviews for consistent evaluation data. (SaaS)
- **AI Scenario Assessment**: Evaluates how candidates plan, prompt, and assess AI-generated outputs through live scenarios. (SaaS)
- **Candidate Recommendations**: Identifies and ranks previously screened applicants from the ATS. (SaaS)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised = **$6M** (Seed VC - II, announced June 2026) [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/heymilo-ai)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Investors include Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Alumni Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Category Ventures. Customers include Randstad, WilsonHCG, and Neo Financial. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/heymilo-ai)
- **Growth Signals**: Has screened over 1 million candidates; operates a globally distributed team across New York, Toronto, Colombo, Vancouver, Stockholm, Manila, Brasília, and Phoenix; launched three new AI agent capabilities in 2026 (AI Scenario Assessment, Candidate Recommendations, Notetaker). [heymilo.ai](https://www.heymilo.ai/about) | [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/heymilo-ai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Bias‑free, ethical AI**: Uses third‑party bias audit checks and provides a “trust score” to detect cheating, ensuring fair evaluations.
- **High candidate satisfaction**: Average candidate satisfaction score of 4.6/5 [heymilo.ai](https://www.heymilo.ai/).
- **Customizable & contextual**: Interview questions can be tuned with objective evaluation criteria, mimicking a real recruiter’s judgment.
- **Multilingual support**: 17+ languages and local dialects for global recruitment.
- **Deep integrations**: One‑click connections with existing ATS and recruiting tools.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Expanding its agentic recruiting platform with new AI hiring agents (Scenario Assessment, Recommendations, Notetaker) and scaling to serve more high‑volume hiring teams globally. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/heymilo-ai)
- **Direction**: Continue building an “intelligence layer” that handles the entire screening funnel, freeing recruiters to focus on high‑value human judgment.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: AI‑native by default – every workflow and product decision assumes AI is a first‑class participant. Values include “team over self,” autonomy with accountability, and shipping decisions without waiting for permission. [heymilo.ai](https://www.heymilo.ai/about)
- **Work model**: Hybrid (offices in New York, Toronto, Colombo, and other cities) with a globally distributed team operating around the clock. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/heymilo-ai)
- **Notable perks**: Emphasis on learning rapidly in a fast‑changing AI landscape; “we hire people who treat every shift as an opportunity to get better.”
- **Open roles** (as of mid‑2026): Senior Software Engineer – Full Stack, Senior Account Executive, SEO & Organic Growth Lead. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/heymilo-ai)

## Sources
1. [heymilo.ai](https://www.heymilo.ai/) – Company homepage and product details
2. [heymilo.ai/careers](https://www.heymilo.ai/careers) – Careers page
3. [heymilo.ai/about](https://www.heymilo.ai/about) – About page, team, and culture
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/heymilo-ai) – Built In profile with jobs, offices, and perks
5. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/heymilo-ai) – CB Insights company profile with funding, investors, and news

## Other roles at HeyMilo

- [Payroll Specialist (Canada)](https://feeny.ai/job/payroll-specialist-canada-heymilo-toronto-9ncfbjx81327) — Toronto, Canada
- [Payroll Specialist (USA)](https://feeny.ai/job/payroll-specialist-usa-heymilo-new-york-d18wvtvs37pw) — New York, NY
- [Research Engineer, Applied AI](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-applied-ai-heymilo-san-francisco-8dx9vkxbw34d) — San Francisco, CA
- [Analyst, Applied AI](https://feeny.ai/job/analyst-applied-ai-heymilo-colombo-4wdspnjsm4fn) — Colombo, Sri Lanka