Founding Research Engineer

About the Company

A seed-stage company that supplies human-generated training data (voice, code, language, research, and professional domains) to frontier AI labs. It runs a marketplace with partnerships on the supply side across more than 20 countries and frontier labs with tight data requirements and deadlines on the demand side. Revenue arrived within the first weeks, and the company has already shipped a coding benchmark that is performing well with customers.

About the Role

This is the first engineer in the San Francisco office and the founding research engineer, building the pipeline of coding RL evaluations and tasks. From day one you work directly with frontier labs, running evaluations of their models on the company's benchmark and on representative tasks. Around month three you begin building RL tasks directly with those labs, and around month six the goal is to lead a small team of engineers.

What You'll Own

• The pipeline of coding RL evaluations and tasks used by frontier labs
• Running model evaluations on the benchmark and on representative customer tasks
• Building RL tasks in direct collaboration with frontier lab partners
• Growing into technical leadership of a small San Francisco engineering team
  
  

What We're Looking For

• 1 to 5 years of experience
• A real research-engineering blend: you already understand RL, coding RL, evals, harnesses, benchmarks, and post-training. This is the hard requirement and will not be taught from scratch.
• Very high agency, earnest, high integrity, and eager to learn
• Experience at a data company serving AI labs is ideal. Without it, concrete self-driven evidence of post-training understanding, such as a personal benchmark, a side project, or a post-training or quant experiment.
• Bonus: research at a strong lab or school, and founding ambitions
• Excited to relocate to San Francisco and work in person. Outside-the-Bay-Area AI obsessives are welcome.
  
  

Logistics

San Francisco, in office five days a week, in a genuinely high-intensity culture with long hours and six-day weeks. Compensation is $150K to $200K base plus 0.25% to 0.5% equity plus a 4% project commission, with total compensation up to roughly $500K. Sponsorship is considered only for clear, direct-path cases; new visa filings from scratch are not workable for this seat, so please confirm your work authorization status early.