Technical Research & Development Specialist (R&D)

About the role

As a Technical Research & Development Specialist (R&D), your primary value is uncovering genuine technical uncertainty, identifying failed approaches and experimental logic, challenging unsupported assumptions, and delivering rigorous, audit-ready first-pass assessments. This role offers a clear growth trajectory: as our offshore technical capability expands, the right person will progress from Technical Research & Development Specialist (R&D) to Senior R&D Technical Specialist, ultimately helping lead and mentor a team of 2–4 technical specialists. You will also have the opportunity to help build AI-enabled internal and public-facing tools that assess R&D activity quality and streamline claim preparation.

What you'll do

• Technical Assessment & Uncertainty Discovery
• Find Core R&D & Technical Uncertainty: Interrogate client transcripts and source materials to extract genuine technological uncertainties, hypotheses, experiments, failed approaches, observations, and conclusions—distinguishing core experimental R&D from work that was simply hard, slow, new, or expensive.
• Check Material Claims Against Source: Rigorously verify every assertion against original client data. If a claim is not explicitly backed by source material, treat it as unsupported rather than trying to make it sound convincing.
• Deliver High-Quality First-Pass Assessments: Prepare accurate, comprehensive initial technical work as part of the learning and production process, allowing the R&D Tax Manager to review rather than write from scratch.
• Client Discovery & Investigation
• Observe & Lead Technical Interviews: Attend technical client interviews alongside our R&D Tax Manager—initially observing how strong R&D activities are identified, progressing toward leading discussions with engineers, CTOs, and technical leads.
• Develop Material Follow-Up Questions: Formulate the five highest-value follow-up questions for every case that materially improve the technical position and fill critical evidence gaps.
• Advanced AI Workflow & System Improvement
• Interrogate Source Material via AI: Use AI to analyze and extract insights from Fathom transcripts and technical documentation rather than manually summarizing line by line.
• Adversarial AI Self-Testing: Establish a daily habit of using AI to challenge your own work before submitting it—prompting AI to act as a skeptical government tax auditor to attack your conclusions, expose weaknesses, and test alternative interpretations.
• Continuous Workflow Optimization: Continuously suggest better prompts, technical interview questions, internal QA workflows, and quality-control processes as you learn.
• Tools & System
• Claude
• ChatGPT
• Microsoft Office
• Google Workspace
• Monday.com (or similar project management software)

Requirements

• 3–5+ years of experience as a scientist, engineer, or technical professional with practical industry experience in engineering, software development, product development, testing, validation, or failure investigation.
• Experimental Thinking: Deep understanding of hypotheses, technical uncertainty, testing, iteration, failure modes, and systematic learning.
• Technical Judgment: Ability to distinguish genuine experimentation from work that was simply hard, slow, new, or expensive.
• Critical Technical Skepticism: A strict habit of checking claims against source evidence and refusing to dress up unsupported statements.
• Ownership: Ability to progress work independently without repeated chasing while actively looking for system improvements.
• Clear Communication: Excellent spoken and written English, with the ability to unpack complex technical concepts and explain reasoning clearly.

About Hunt St

At Hunt St, we help Australian companies hire top remote talent in the Philippines. For this role, you will be formally employed through an Employer of Record (EOR) arrangement. We are not an outsourcing agency. All of our roles are 100% remote, so you’ll be able to work from home.

Visit Hunt St→

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