Research Engineer

Research Engineer

San Francisco, CA - 5 days onsite.

$180K-$220K + early stage equity

My client is an early-stage AI research company building advanced reasoning systems and post-training infrastructure for enterprise AI applications.

The team comes from leading AI labs and startups, with backgrounds across LLMs, reinforcement learning, distributed systems, and applied research.

They are looking for a highly technical Research Engineer to work on:
LLM post-training and fine-tuning
RLHF / DPO / reward modeling
Synthetic data generation
Evaluation frameworks and reasoning systems
Distributed training and inference infrastructure
Agentic AI workflows and production deployments

The role is highly hands-on and suited to someone who has actually trained, evaluated, and deployed models, not just built on top of APIs.

Requirements:
Strong Python + PyTorch experience
Hands-on LLM training/fine-tuning experience
Strong ML/AI fundamentals
Experience working in fast-moving technical environments
Strong engineering ability and research mindset

Nice to have:
RLHF / evals / synthetic data experience
Distributed systems exposure
Publications or open-source contributions
Experience at strong AI startups or research labs
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