---
title: 'Research Engineer, Judgment Systems at Variance'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-judgment-systems-variance-san-francisco-3czxbrkkqtvr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Research Engineer, Judgment Systems at Variance

- **Company:** Variance
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $250k–$300k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-03-31
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/intrinsic-safety/e68b8f6a-c8ea-4295-99bd-a95a22d86fac

## Job description

## ROLE

At Variance, we are teaching machines to make the hardest judgment calls at scale. We build AI agents for the high-precision gray area of stopping fraud, scams, and abuse. This isn't another sales tool or a customer service system. We're solving real problems in investigations and fraud prevention to protect innocent people from being harmed.

We’re a small, talent-dense team in San Francisco working on a problem at the edge of what AI systems can reliably do: making good decisions in messy, adversarial, real-world environments.

We’re looking for a Research Engineer to help push that frontier forward. You’ll design evals, study failures, build new research loops, and turn research ideas into production capabilities.

This role sits at the intersection of research and engineering: part model builder, part experimentalist, part systems engineer.

## YOU’RE A FIT IF YOU:

- Care deeply about protecting people from fraud, scams, and abuse
- Have strong opinions about model quality, evaluation, and experimental rigor
- Want to work on core model and agent behavior
- Are excited to train, fine-tune, and improve models for hard real-world judgment tasks
- Think in tight research loops: hypothesis, experiment, evaluation, failure analysis, iteration
- Thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the path is not obvious and the feedback loop is short
- Are motivated by the challenge of making AI systems work in adversarial, regulated, and high-consequence settings
- Want to help define what trustworthy AI means in real-world use cases

## WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Train, fine-tune, and improve models for fraud, scams, abuse, and other high-stakes judgment workflows
- Own research threads focused on improving agent capability, reliability, and decision quality
- Build proprietary benchmarks, datasets, and evals that reflect real customer workflows, regulatory constraints, and real failure modes
- Design and run experiments across post-training, retrieval, tool use, planning, memory, and long-horizon agent behavior
- Study where models break, why they break, and how to make them more robust
- Prototype new training strategies, agent architectures, and evaluation methods, then turn the best ideas into production systems
- Work closely with founders and engineering to translate research advances into deployed product capabilities
- Push the boundary of what AI agents can do in regulated industries

## WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

- Our models get materially better at making hard judgment calls in production
- Our models are trusted at scale
- We develop evals and training loops that compound over time
- We understand failure modes more clearly and improve system behavior faster
- New research ideas turn into real product capabilities quickly

## PREFERRED BACKGROUND

- Experience training, fine-tuning, or evaluating modern ML systems
- Strong programming skills and comfort working in research-heavy codebases
- Familiarity with LLMs, agent systems, post-training, reinforcement learning, retrieval, or adjacent areas
- Ability to design clean experiments and draw reliable conclusions from noisy results
- Strong engineering judgment and a bias toward building
- Interest in fraud, risk, trust and safety, compliance, or other regulated and adversarial domains

## OUR CULTURE

We believe in ownership, urgency, and craft. We enjoy spirited debate, wild ideas, and building things we’re proud of. We’re fully in-person in San Francisco.

## WHAT WE OFFER

- Competitive salary and meaningful equity
- Platinum-level medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Unlimited PTO, sick leave, and parental leave
- Up to $100 per month in reimbursement for personal health and wellness expenses
- 401(k) plan

## About Variance

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Variance builds AI agents that automate complex risk investigations, such as sanctions screening and fraud review, for Fortune 500s and regulated financial institutions.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A, $21.5M raised in March 2026)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Michael Lin and Karine Mellata

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Enterprise AI, Compliance Technology, Cybersecurity, Risk Management
- **Target customers**: Fortune 500 companies, marketplaces, and regulated financial services (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "To build technology that helps good prevail in highly adversarial environments." [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/company)

## Products & Services
- **Variance AI Agents**: A suite of AI agents designed to automate the full investigative workflow for compliance and risk teams. Agents can handle tasks from Level 1 to Level 3 reviews, including sanctions screening, fraud review, and identity verification. They extract insights from messy data (scanned documents, images, websites) and provide a complete, auditable evidence trail for every decision. [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $24.6M ($3.1M Seed in 2024 + $21.5M Series A in March 2026). [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/variance)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Winter 2023 batch), with the Series A led by a prominent venture firm (specific lead investor not named in the provided search results, but the round was reported by Axios and Business Wire).
- **Growth Signals**: Raised a $21.5M Series A in March 2026, signaling strong market traction. The company claims its agents can reduce investigative cycles by 10x and collect 90% of evidence for each case. Trusted by Fortune 500s.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Auditability & Explainability**: Unlike many "black box" AI systems, Variance is "built for regulators and auditors." Every decision comes with a complete, cited evidence trail, making it defensible in a highly regulated environment.
- **Adversarial Focus**: The company is explicitly designed for "highly adversarial environments" where threats evolve constantly, giving it a sharper focus than general-purpose automation tools.
- **Speed to Production**: The company emphasizes a culture of velocity, measuring timelines from prototype to production in "days, not months," allowing them to adapt quickly to new fraud patterns.

## Strategic Focus
- **Deepening Enterprise Sales**: The company is actively hiring Enterprise Account Executives and Sales Engineers, indicating a push to expand its customer base among large, regulated institutions.
- **Product Development**: Open roles for Research Engineers (Evals, Judgment Systems) and Senior Software Engineers suggest a continued focus on improving the accuracy, reliability, and reasoning capabilities of their AI agents.
- **Scaling the Team**: With a Series A close in early 2026, the company is in a clear growth phase, expanding its engineering and go-to-market teams from a small base (12-person team per YC profile).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Values**: The company emphasizes a culture of **Ownership** (every employee is an owner from day one), **Velocity** (fast iteration), **Craftsmanship** (deep care and intentionality in building), and **Impact** (building systems trusted for mission-critical decisions). [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/company)
- **Work Policy**: In-person in San Francisco.
- **Compensation & Perks**: Offers competitive salary and meaningful equity. Benefits include platinum-tier medical/dental/vision insurance, a 401(k) program, unlimited PTO/sick leave/parental leave, daily catered lunches and dinners, a monthly wellness stipend, commuter benefits, and company events. [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/careers)
- **Engineering Culture**: A high-agency environment where engineers own end-to-end responsibility for systems. The work is technically challenging, involving building AI that operates in real-time against sophisticated adversaries.

## Sources
1. [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/)
2. [variance.com/company](https://www.variance.com/company)
3. [variance.com/careers](https://www.variance.com/careers)
4. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/variance)

## Other roles at Variance

- [Software Engineer, Agent](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-agent-variance-san-francisco-dza9223d58q9) — San Francisco, CA
- [Enterprise Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-variance-san-francisco-0sebfqrpdc9k) — San Francisco, CA
- [Agent Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/agent-product-manager-variance-san-francisco-7kwq2pbz1mkv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-variance-san-francisco-whvwasrtj9m7) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-lead-variance-san-francisco-8qk1v7zqt80f) — San Francisco, CA
- [Enterprise Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-variance-new-york-yd980aaksyfc) — New York, NY
- [Research Engineer, Evals](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-evals-variance-san-francisco-geadd7cbpjyz) — San Francisco, CA
- [Enterprise Sales Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-sales-engineer-variance-san-francisco-wz60q5thfqf1) — San Francisco, CA
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- [Senior Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-variance-san-francisco-vd07ecwmbygz) — San Francisco, CA