Senior Research Engineer - Experimental Engineering

Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to a fair and just marketplace through rigorous testing, trusted ratings, and consumer advocacy. The Senior Research Engineer will lead exploratory engineering research, rapidly prototype emerging AI and machine learning applications, and guide strategic technology initiatives. The role also provides technical leadership for the AskCR RAG chatbot, collaborates across teams, documents experiments, and mentors engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Lead exploratory spikes, proof-of-concept projects, and early-stage prototyping end-to-end to test high-impact, forward-looking ideas
• Identify strategic opportunities in emerging technologies (notably AI/ML) and translate these opportunities into actionable prototypes
• Serve as a technical leader on AskCR, our RAG chatbot built on Consumer Reports' product testing, journalism, and advocacy work and own architectural decisions on retrieval, evaluation, and orchestration
• Collaborate closely on technical planning, architecture, and implementation efforts for AskCR, our RAG chatbot built on Consumer Report’s product testing, journalism and advocacy work
• Work collaboratively across cross-functional teams (Digital Product, Product Testing, User Research, Data Engineering, Advocacy) to share insights and ensure learnings are leveraged broadly across Consumer Reports
• Establish and refine practices for documenting experiments and synthesizing research outputs to maximize their organizational impact
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across the team
• Cultivate a culture of curiosity, experimentation, rapid learning, and discovery