Research Engineer

About the Role

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 Do

• Build 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.

What We're Looking For

• 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.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA, USA. Candidates based in Singapore are also considered.