Jobs / ML and research engineering / 15-1221.00
Computer and Information Research Scientists
Conduct research into fundamental computer and information science as theorists, designers, or inventors. Develop solutions to problems in the field of computer hardware and software.
- US jobs
- 37,200
- Median wage
- $140,300 a year
- Job family
- ML and research engineering
Can agents do the work of computer and information research scientists?
We read the evidence at the level of the job family, ML and research engineering:
- Task levelPartialMixed, and partly stale. On RE-Bench, METR's AI research engineering tasks, the best recorded agent matched the 37th percentile of human experts at an 8-hour budget, but that result is from January 2025. CORE-Bench, which asks agents to reproduce published results from the authors' code, was declared solved in December 2025 (95.5% after manual regrading).
- Project levelPartialMixed. On MLE-bench, 75 offline Kaggle competitions, the best agent wins a medal in 64.4% of them. On PaperBench, where agents replicate ML papers from scratch, the best official result is 26.0% (o1, April 2025); on a small subset, ML PhDs scored 41.4%. PaperBench has no newer official results.
Benchmarks for this occupation
- 95.5%Claude Code + Claude Opus 4.5 (after manual regrading) · 3 Dec 2025Solved
Benchmarks for the job family
These cover work in ml and research engineering, not always this occupation's tasks.
- 84.7%NexAU-AHE + GPT-5.5 · 23 Apr 2026Retired
Typical tasks
From O*NET 31.0. Core tasks first. Few of these tasks have a benchmark today.
- Analyze problems to develop solutions involving computer hardware and software.
- Apply theoretical expertise and innovation to create or apply new technology, such as adapting principles for applying computers to new uses.
- Assign or schedule tasks to meet work priorities and goals.
- Meet with managers, vendors, and others to solicit cooperation and resolve problems.
- Design computers and the software that runs them.
- Conduct logical analyses of business, scientific, engineering, and other technical problems, formulating mathematical models of problems for solution by computers.
- Evaluate project plans and proposals to assess feasibility issues.
- Participate in multidisciplinary projects in areas such as virtual reality, human-computer interaction, or robotics.
- Consult with users, management, vendors, and technicians to determine computing needs and system requirements.
- Develop and interpret organizational goals, policies, and procedures.
- Develop performance standards, and evaluate work in light of established standards.
- Maintain network hardware and software, direct network security measures, and monitor networks to ensure availability to system users.
Other job titles for this occupation (31)
Computer Scientist · Computer Specialist · Control System Computer Scientist · Research Scientist · Scientific Programmer Analyst · AI Engineer (Artificial Intelligence Engineer) · Applied Scientist · Artificial Intelligence Specialist (AI Specialist) · Computational Linguist · Computational Scientist · Computational Theory Scientist · Computer Vision Scientist · Cryptologist · Cybersecurity Research Scientist (Cyber Research Scientist) · Digital Solutions Manager · Information Scientist · Languages Researcher · Machine Learning Data Scientist · Machine Learning Engineer · Machine Learning Research Scientist · Machine Learning Scientist · Machine Learning Software Engineer · Multi-Disciplined Language Analyst · NLP Engineer (Natural Language Processing Engineer) · Programming Languages Researcher · Programming Methodology Researcher · Research and Development Specialist (R and D Specialist) · Research Computer Scientist · Research Engineer · Scientist · Site Reliability Engineer