Research Engineer
Job Description
This is a Research Engineer role at an early-stage AI infrastructure startup building the technical foundation for training and evaluating frontier AI agents. You'll work across QC automation, benchmarks, and synthetic data — sitting at the intersection of research and engineering to shape how agents learn and improve. The work is high-impact and highly ambiguous, with direct influence on the direction of the platform.
What You'll DoBuild systems for creating new environments, improving data quality, and translating real-world workflows into tasks and benchmarks.
Design and run experiments to understand model behavior, agent failure modes, and data quality issues.
Develop internal tools that help researchers, engineers, and data vendors produce higher-quality tasks, trajectories, and feedback loops.
Work across the full lifecycle of agent training data — from task design and environment setup through trajectory collection, evaluation, and validation.
Partner with external vendors to identify bottlenecks and improve the quality and throughput of the data engine.
Build metrics and analyses to assess whether tasks, environments, and evals are genuinely useful for training frontier agents.
2–4 years of professional experience as a Research Engineer or in a similar role delivering systems for AI agent training and evaluation.
Strong proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments.
Hands-on experience with benchmarks and evaluations for RL training, including reasoning about task realism, rubric reliability, environment usability, and trajectory quality.
Proven ability to build tools, pipelines, and research infrastructure with minimal guidance in early-stage settings.
Experience designing experiments, metrics, and validation workflows to understand model and data quality.
Comfort operating in fast-paced, unstructured environments and communicating clearly across time zones.
Strong quantitative or technical foundation — demonstrated through competitive programming, academic research, or strong independent project work.
Salary range: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
LocationOn-site in San Francisco, CA, USA. Candidates based in Singapore are also considered.
