Research Engineer - AI Evaluations

Karya’s mission is to leverage the AI revolution to create dignified earning and learning opportunities for low-income communities across the world. In India, our smartphone-based digital work platform has enabled over 120,000 people to build language datasets and evaluate AI models while earning fair wages. With pilots in Kenya and Ethiopia and partnerships with leading AI labs, we are advancing language technologies for underrepresented communities. By combining dignified digital work with frontier AI innovation, Karya hopes to build a new AI economy that is equitable, inclusive, and community driven.

Karya's AI Evaluations team measures how well AI models serve people in the languages and contexts global benchmarks miss. We work with partners including Anthropic and Microsoft Research, alongside government and civil society, running evaluations on our own platform with native speakers and domain experts across India and beyond. Our benchmarks, leaderboards and reports aim to help model developers and decision-makers understand where models work well and where they fall short.

As a Research Engineer, you will design, build and run these evaluations end to end, across eval design, model deployment, statistical analysis and engineering. The work spans ASR, TTS, machine translation and chat, with newer frontiers in agentic and multimodal evaluation.

What You'll Do 

• Benchmark design: curate representative query sets and define rubrics and metrics that score reliably and separate models meaningfully. Choose between human, automated and hybrid evaluation based on reliability, cost and validity trade-offs.
• Expert input: design elicitation and adjudication processes that turn domain expertise into consistent, scalable judgments.
• Bias evaluation: develop methods to detect gender and other social biases in LLM outputs across languages and cultures.
• Model deployment: serve models through APIs and self-hosted GPU inference, with versioned configs, logging and controls for reproducible results at scale. Trace failures in multi-stage AI pipelines to the responsible component.
• Analysis and leaderboards: analyse evaluation data with sound statistical methods (agreement, uncertainty, significance, disaggregation), validate automated judges against human ground truth, and aggregate noisy judgments into rankings that account for annotator reliability and uncertainty.
• Infrastructure: build and maintain modular evaluation pipelines and leaderboard infrastructure, covering sampling, inference, task packaging, scoring and reporting, with tested, documented code.
• Research: prototype new evaluation methods, and turn results into publications, technical reports and public releases.

What You Bring

Must Have:

• 4+ years in ML engineering or applied ML research, shipping production-quality systems.
• Strong software engineering, including clean, tested Python and end-to-end data and ML pipelines.
• Deep working knowledge of modern AI architectures and inference, including quality, latency and cost trade-offs.
• Rigorous grounding in probability and statistics on noisy real-world data.
• Ability to independently turn ambiguous questions into rigorous, executable technical work.
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP or a related field preferred; equivalent industry or research experience will be considered.

Strong differentiators

• Experience building benchmarks or evaluation systems.
• Experience with human judgment data.
• Experience with speech or multilingual NLP, especially Indian languages.
• Publications or open-source work in AI or related domains.

Mindset

• Sceptical of numbers until you know how they were produced.
• Thrives in interdisciplinary teams spanning engineering, research, social science, operations and domain experts.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, messy data and evolving requirements, and maintains rigour under tight timelines.
• Cares about building AI that works for the people it is meant to serve.

What We Offer

• Flexible leave and vacation policy
• Hybrid work options
• Insurance as per industry standards
• Access to leaders in technology and social impact sectors
• A chance to contribute meaningfully to AI, digital equity, and rural development

Karya celebrates diversity and is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered without regard to race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or any other protected status.