Founding Researcher

Opportunity

Coding agents now write most of the code. The bottleneck has moved from typing to everything around it: observing, monitoring, debugging, root-causing, on-call, deciding what’s safe to ship. The lifecycle is collapsing into two halves. One half is intent. The other is execution. The execution half should not be as hard.

We’re building Polylane: the platform that lets developers ship self-operating software. Software that watches itself in production, investigates anomalies, finds root causes, and ships fixes before anyone gets paged. Software that operates itself.

None of that works unless the agents are trustworthy. This role’s goal is to improve the models and the harnesses behind self-operating software. The hard problem is not getting a model to propose a fix; it is knowing, empirically, when the agent is right, when it is guessing, and how to move that boundary run after run. This is research in production: your experiments ship to real workspaces, and the feedback loop is measured in days, not conference cycles.

What you’d work on

• Improving the models themselves: post-training on real operational data so they investigate production systems better with every run.
• Improving the harness: the agent loop, the tools, and the context, so the same model gets further on the same incident.
• Building evaluation harnesses that score agent investigations against ground truth from real production incidents.
• Running context engineering experiments: what to inject, when, and how much, across briefings, memory, and retrieval.
• Studying failure modes of tool-using agents on long-horizon operational tasks and turning them into fixes.
• Publishing internally, and externally when it makes us sharper.

What we’re looking for

You should have shipped LLM systems and measured them seriously, beyond demos and vibes. You’re fluent in evaluation methodology: building datasets, defining metrics, avoiding contamination.

You write production-quality code in TypeScript or Python and don’t need a research engineer to ship. You have opinions about agent reliability, grounding, and context windows, backed by experiments.

You’re comfortable when the answer is “we don’t know yet” and rigorous about finding out.

Who is Coreplane Labs?

A small team, and the company behind Polylane. We’ve operated at Cloudflare scale, where we built the observability platform used by millions of developers every day. We’ve spent years writing, operating, and breaking production systems for a living.

Coreplane is what comes next. Based in San Francisco. We work in person.