Research Engineer — QUIPU
The role:
We want a Research Engineer who codes — not someone learning to, but someone who already codes well and wants to point that ability at genuinely hard problems.
Your domain is the full platform stack: the APIs, services, and interfaces. But full stack here means reasoning about consistency models and data flow not wiring endpoints.
You'll prototype ideas that may never ship. You'll also ship things that run in production. That balance is the point.
What you'll do
- Build backend services that expose over clean APIs
- Implement event-driven pipelines that ingest, transform, and route high-throughput streams
- Prototype new approaches to graph traversal, lineage tracking, and temporal queries.
- Work in the distributed messaging and persistence layer, owning the tradeoffs, not just the config
- Build minimal, purposeful frontends for internal tooling and client-facing query exploration
- Read papers and turn the good ideas into working prototypes
- Write code your team can read, extend, and trust
- Argue in architecture reviews, your opinions are expected
What you must have (non-negotiable)
- Production-quality code: tested, readable, reasoning about edge cases, not just the happy path
- Real grasp of concurrency: futures, async models, race conditions, back-pressure
- Comfort with JVM internals: memory model, GC, thread scheduling
- Distributed systems fundamentals: consistency, ordering, failure modes
- Fluency with Linux, Git, and an actual debugging workflow
Strong advantage
- Java / Spring Boot and/or Scala, type systems, FP, effect management
- Performance-critical, systems-level work
- Python for prototyping, ML tooling, data exploration
- D3.js / Angular: you'll touch the frontend; don't be afraid of it
**Don't apply if
- You want a finished spec before line one
- You can't say I don't know in a technical discussion
- You measure your week in tickets closed
- Distributed systems problems frustrate you rather than interest you
- You want a big team, set processes, and a predictable roadmap
Qualifications
- CS/Engineering degree (Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD). Strong development, debugging, and system-design chops. Familiarity with AI/ML frameworks and data processing. Cloud and large-scale distributed systems experience is a plus. Prior deep-tech or data-heavy environment, highly desirable.
What we're building
QUIPU is a deep-tech startup building a real-time digital thread engine: a system that captures the complete, queryable history of complex systems as a living graph. Every event, relationship, and state change — preserved, linked, instantly accessible across time.
The hard problem: model, store, and reason over the evolving state of millions of interconnected entities, in real time. This is infrastructure-level research engineering.
Small team. Ambitious codebase. You will matter here.
