Forward Deployed Research Engineer

About the Role

Join a small, high-caliber engineering team at a fast-moving AI infrastructure company building the platform for reinforcement learning (RL) environments and post-training data. As a Forward Deployed Research Engineer, you will own end-to-end implementation for urgent, ambiguous technical challenges facing frontier AI labs and data vendors. Your work will directly unblock critical deployments and transform repeated firefighting into reusable tooling — with real impact from day one.

This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA, with visa sponsorship available.

What You'll Do

• Take the lead on diagnosing and resolving ambiguous technical problems quickly and independently.

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

• Ask the right questions to clarify under-specified asks and identify what actually needs to be done.

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

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

• Balance speed and quality in high-pressure situations where the path forward is not fully defined.

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

What We're Looking For

Required (dealbreakers):

• 2–4 years of experience as an Applied Research Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, or in a comparable hands-on technical role.

• Proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments.

• Experience working on benchmarks and evals for RL training data and AI agents — with sound judgment about what makes a task realistic, a rubric reliable, and a trajectory useful for RL training.

Strong requirements:

• Demonstrated experience owning technical deployment requests from triage to completion.

• Ability to build tools and one-off pipelines under time pressure.

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

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

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

• Experience documenting issues and automating manual work into reusable processes.

Nice to have:

• Prior experience at an early-stage startup.

• Experience handling urgent production or customer-facing deployment issues.

• Strong communication skills for cross-timezone remote collaboration.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually, depending on experience.

• Visa sponsorship: Available.

Location

This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA, United States. Candidates based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco are strongly preferred. There is also an office presence in Singapore.