Applied Research Engineer

Skip to main content Applied Research Engineer Duku AI Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa Apply Join or sign in to find your next job Join to apply for the Applied Research Engineer role at Duku AI Email or phone Password Show Forgot password? Sign in Sign in with Email or New to LinkedIn? Join now By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy. Applied Research Engineer Duku AI Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa 1 month ago 32 applicants See who Duku AI has hired for this role Apply Join or sign in to find your next job Join to apply for the Applied Research Engineer role at Duku AI Email or phone Password Show Forgot password? Sign in Sign in with Email or New to LinkedIn? Join now By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy. Save Report this job Change Software ForeverMost research roles publish papers. This one ships the intelligence that makes AI-generated software trustworthy in production. AI is making engineers dramatically more productive. The problem is nobody fully trusts what AI ships.Why this matters nowAI is rewriting how software gets built. But shipping still breaks on testing. Engineering leaders are desperate to release faster without dropping quality, and they can't get there with manual QA or brittle test automation.Here's the bigger shift: as AI writes more of the code, the bottleneck moves from generating software to trusting it. Nobody owns that trust layer yet. Duku is building it, autonomous agents that simulate real users, catch critical failures before production, and self-heal as the product evolves.Backed by experienced operators and investors, we're building what we believe will become a core layer of the modern software stack. We're looking for an exceptional Applied Research Engineer to help invent it. Not someone to apply existing methods. Someone to discover new ones.Why This Role is DifferentAboutMost “AI engineer” jobs are just applying models someone else built. This isn’t that. This is about pushing RL to its edge:Agents that think: networks that see and understand apps through vision, structure, and behavior.Agents that explore: curiosity-driven RL that uncovers edge cases no human would think of.Agents that learn: smarter with every bug, sharper with every correction.Agents that scale: millions of states, thousands of sessions, decisions in sub-seconds.If you’ve ever wanted to take RL out of papers and into the wild, this is it.What You’ll AchieveIn your first three months, you’ll see your reinforcement learning prototypes running live inside real applications, surfacing bugs no human ever noticed.By six months, those agents will have evolved , scaling across multiple...