Forward Deployed Research Engineer

About the Role

This is a hands-on, end-to-end ownership role on a small, high-caliber engineering team building infrastructure for AI evaluation and reinforcement learning environments. You'll be the person who unblocks critical deployments for frontier AI labs and data vendors — diagnosing ambiguous problems fast, shipping solutions, and turning repeated firefighting into durable tooling. The work is urgent, impactful, and rarely fully prescribed.

What You'll Do

• Take the lead on diagnosing and resolving ambiguous technical problems as they arise.

• Own technical deployment requests from frontier AI labs and data vendors, from initial triage through to completion.

• Ask the right questions to clarify underspecified asks and identify what actually needs to be built.

• Build one-off tools and pipelines to solve urgent customer or partner problems quickly.

• Coordinate with research and go-to-market teams to keep deployments moving.

• Balance speed and quality under time pressure when the path forward isn't fully defined.

• Document recurring issues and convert repeated manual work into reusable tools and processes.

What We're Looking For

• 2–4 years of experience in applied research engineering, forward-deployed engineering, or a closely related hands-on technical role.

• Proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments.

• Experience working on benchmarks and evals — with solid judgment about task realism, rubric reliability, and trajectory quality for RL training.

• Strong debugging instincts across code, data, and environments.

• Proven ability to operate independently in ambiguous situations without a fully prescribed roadmap.

• Comfort working directly with technical customers, vendors, and cross-functional internal teams.

• Experience handling urgent production, customer, or deployment issues under pressure.

• Early-stage startup experience and the ability to move fast in a small, high-ownership environment.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills for async, cross-timezone collaboration.

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 or able to relocate to San Francisco are preferred. The role may also be based in Singapore.