Technical Research and Development Specialist – R&D
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Job Description
Technical Research & Development Specialist handling R&D assessments for Australian professional services firm. Engaging in technical uncertainty discovery and analysis through AI-assisted workflows.
Responsibilities:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- Highly Desirable
- Sufficient software-development literacy to understand technical limitations, failed architectural approaches, testing frameworks, and code logic.
- Daily, practical experience using Claude, ChatGPT, or similar tools for complex technical analysis and structured data extraction (rather than just drafting emails).
- Prior experience working with Australian, UK, or US businesses.
- Bonus Points
- Hands-on experience with Claude Code, Cursor, automation tools, or lightweight application development.
- Experience building/refining advanced prompt frameworks, AI workflows, or automated review processes.
- Background or familiarity with the Australian R&D Tax Incentive framework (specifically the legal definitions of Core and Supporting R&D activities).
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