HRL Laboratories pioneers the next frontiers of physical and information science. Delivering transformative technologies in automotive, aerospace and defense, HRL advances the critical missions of its customers to help them remove limitations and create competitive advantage. HRL then transitions the work back to customers – ready for real-world application. For more than 70 years, HRL’s rich portfolio of scientific discoveries and engineering innovations continues to build on each other — often in unexpected, profound and far-reaching ways. As a private company owned jointly by Boeing and GM, HRL prioritizes purpose over profit, significantly advancing the state of the art.
HRL Laboratories develops robust intelligent systems that deliver adaptable, autonomous performance improvement solutions for complex missions. Our teams advance human-machine synergy, operationalized machine learning models and complex systems analytics and agents to create scalable, secure technologies. We design novel algorithms and mission-ready solutions that strengthen decision making for autonomous and human-guided systems across national security and commercial applications.
Essential Duties:
• Conduct advanced research in LLMs, Generative AI, and agentic AI systems, staying current with rapidly evolving techniques such as tool-augmented reasoning, planning agents, and multi-agent collaboration.
• Design and prototype LLM-based agents capable of reasoning, planning, tool invocation, memory management, and autonomous task execution.
• Develop and optimize retrieval-augmented and tool-augmented generation pipelines (RAG, Graph-RAG, hybrid search, vector & symbolic retrieval).
• Build and evaluate end-to-end agent workflows, including orchestration, tool APIs, state tracking, and long-horizon planning.
• Implement robust evaluation pipelines for LLMs and agents (offline evals, LLM-as-judge, human-in-the-loop evaluation, red-teaming, and safety validation).
• Experiment with open-source and frontier foundation models (e.g., Llama, Mistral, Claude, Gemini, GPT-class models) and efficient adaptation techniques.
• Contribute to scalable production systems, including model serving, orchestration frameworks, observability, guardrails, and lifecycle management.
• Participate in internal research reviews, technical deep dives, and code walkthroughs.
Required Qualifications:
• Currently pursuing M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, Applied Mathematics, or a related technical field.
• Strong foundation in machine learning and NLP, including transformers, attention mechanisms, and modern generative modeling.
• Proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
• Hands-on experience with LLM tooling and frameworks, such as: HuggingFace, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, or similar orchestration frameworks
• Familiarity with agentic AI patterns, including Tool use / function calling, Planning & reasoning (ReAct, Tree/Graph of Thoughts, etc.), Memory architectures (short-term, long-term, vector DBs)
• Experience with RAG pipelines, embeddings, and vector databases.
• Understanding of prompting strategies, fine-tuning, and alignment techniques (SFT, RLHF/DPO, PEFT/LoRA).
• Strong software engineering practices, including version control, testing, and documentation.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly and collaborate in a research-engineering environment.
Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience building autonomous or semi-autonomous agent systems in real applications.
• Familiarity with multi-agent systems, coordination, and distributed reasoning.
• Knowledge of evaluation and benchmarking frameworks for LLMs and agents
• Experience with model optimization techniques: Quantization, distillation, speculative decoding, KV-cache optimization
• Familiarity with deployment stacks: Docker/Kubernetes, model serving, GPU/accelerator pipelines
• Exposure to knowledge graphs, symbolic reasoning, or hybrid neuro-symbolic AI systems.
• Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects or publications (ACL, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.).
Special Requirements:
• US Citizenship and ability to obtain and maintain US Government security clearance.
Compensation and Benefits:
Pay Range: $43 - $48 an hour
• Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location (California). The range displayed on each job posting reflects the target range for new hire salaries for the position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range during the hiring process.
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Benefits: HRL offers a generous and very competitive total compensation and benefits package. Our Regular/Full Time benefits include medical, dental, vision, life insurance, 401K match, gym facilities, PTO, Sick time, upward mobility, and an •
For more information about our company benefit offerings please visit: https://www.hrl.com/careers/benefits
Non-Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunities (U.S.)
Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that some people are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single desired qualification. At HRL, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
We are proud to be an EEO/AA employer M/F/D/V. We maintain a drug-free workplace and perform pre-employment substance abuse testing.