Applied Research - Forward-Deployed RL

Role overview Lead applied reinforcement learning programs from an unclear external workflow or business need through evaluation, experimentation, and deployment. Most work is organized around external programs: you’ll partner with customer researchers, engineers, and leaders, deliver a practical result, and identify methods or tools that can be reused across other projects.

Responsibilities - Translate a partner’s workflow and goals into a research plan, measurable outcomes, an environment, and a baseline. - Build evaluations that reflect the intended task and help partners judge progress. - Run RL, distillation, or other post-training experiments tied to deployment results. - Develop agents that handle tools, memory, recovery, long tasks, and human oversight. - Separate model limitations from issues in task design, data, harnesses, inference, or integration. - Carry successful experiments into deployment, measure their effect, and turn recurring components into reusable research or platform assets.

Requirements - Experience in customer-embedded technical work, research engineering, technical founding, applied ML consulting with hands-on build ownership, or end-to-end post-training programs. - Comfort working with senior external teams and connecting experimental findings to business decisions while maintaining research rigor. - Experience building and debugging training, post-training, agent, evaluation, or related experimental workflows. - Strong experimental practice: meaningful baselines, careful trace review, clear failure attribution, and willingness to revise an approach when evidence changes. - Strong Python skills and ability to build artifacts others can run, inspect, and extend. - Ability to own ambiguous work, communicate clearly with partners, and show evidence of substantial work such as publications, open-source projects, benchmarks, or shipped products.

Benefits and work setup - Full-time, with work locations listed in San Francisco, New York, London, or remotely. - Listed cash compensation is $150,000–$300,000, plus equity incentives. - Visa sponsorship and relocation support, a professional development budget, and team off-sites and conference attendance are offered.