About the role
The role
Own the models behind Coval’s judges. Coval is the evaluation platform for conversational AI: we help enterprise teams simulate, monitor and improve voice and chat agents before those agents ever reach a customer. Because our product is the judge, this role sits at the center of the company.
You’ll own the model side end to end. You’ll design and ship the LLM-as-a-judge evaluations that score voice and chat conversations at scale, then sharpen them with LoRA fine-tunes on open-weight models and non-tuning work like tool use and context engineering. Your improvements ship directly into the product enterprises rely on to launch dependable voice agents.
What you’ll do
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Design and ship the LLM judges that score conversations: rubrics, judge prompting, and calibration against human raters
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Build the reliability tracking that keeps judges honest from release to release
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Run post-training where training beats prompting: LoRA adapters on open-weight models, trained on data distilled from our own scored conversations
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Everywhere else, do the non-tuning capability work: tool use, structured outputs, and context engineering
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Keep asking which lever actually moves the metric, and focus there
What we’re looking for
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4+ years as an engineer, with strong systems instincts
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A track record of shipping measurable quality gains by pairing rigorous measurement with targeted training, not vibes and prompt tweaks
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You’ve built eval infrastructure you actually trust
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You’ve run LoRA/SFT experiments end to end, including preparing your own data rather than relying on clean data from other teams, so you know which lever really wins
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High agency: on a small Series A team, nobody hands you tickets. You figure out what matters next and drive it there
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Ambitious and kind. You’ll be part of the group that founds our engineering org, sets its bar and grows the team
About Coval
Coval accelerates AI agent development with automated testing for chat, voice, and other objective-oriented systems. Many engineering teams are racing to market with AI agents, but slow manual testing processes are holding them back. Teams currently play whack-a-mole just to discover that fixing one issue introduces another. At Coval, we use automated simulation and evaluation techniques inspired by the autonomous vehicle industry to boost test coverage, speed up development, and validate consistent performance.
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Job details
Salary
$150,000 - $300,000
Location
San Francisco, CA
Funding
Total raised
$31M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
Founders
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.
