{"id":2867457,"url":"https://alion.io/job/prime-intellect-applied-research-forward-deployed-rl","title":"Applied Researcher - Forward-Deployed RL","company":{"id":5907,"name":"Prime Intellect","domain":"primeintellect.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/primeintellect","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":23,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":98,"computed_at":"2026-11-03T05:54:40Z"}},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","New York, United States","London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["US","GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":150000,"max":300000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":300000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Cloudflare","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"Datadog","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"LangChain","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"OpenRouter","optional":false},{"name":"Perplexity","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Together AI","optional":false},{"name":"Zapier","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-19T15:29:13Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-19","last_verified_at":"2026-11-03T07:03:00Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":14,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":14},"description":"Own Your Intelligence\nPrime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team.\nOur platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own.\nPrime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators - including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more. We are looking for people who want to build at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a category that does not fully exist yet.\nRole Impact\nYou will own applied RL programs from the first ambiguous customer problem through a deployed improvement loop. You will understand the workflow and business stakes, decide what can be measured and learned, build the environment and evaluation, run post-training experiments, deploy the result, and determine what should generalize into Prime's shared stack. The majority of your work will be organized around external programs. You will work directly with customer researchers, engineers, and leaders, and you will be accountable for both the research result and its practical impact.\nResponsibilities\nApplied Research at Prime\nWe turn a workflow into tasks, environments, evaluations, and reward signals, run post-training experiments against real baselines, and deploy what works. When a result looks good, we find out whether the gain came from the model or from the data, harness, inference, or infrastructure. The reusable parts become shared research, open-source systems, and product capabilities.\nEvery Applied Research role is externally facing. Most researchers work directly with customers, users, or research partners while maintaining a substantive research agenda.\nRole scope\nWe have active programs across technology, science, engineering, regulated industries, and the public sector.\nRepresentative early problems\nTurn a partially documented workflow and business goal into an environment, baseline, and evaluation that the customer team agrees measures the right outcome.\n\nImprove a domain agent through RL or another post-training method while separating model limitations from task, harness, inference, and integration failures.\n\nCarry a successful experiment into deployment, measure its effect on the customer outcome, and convert the recurring parts into reusable environments, recipes, data loops, or platform capabilities.\n\nWhat you will own\nTechnical and business discovery that produces a clear research plan, success measure, environment, and baseline.\n\nRL, distillation, and other post-training experiments tied to deployment outcomes.\n\nAgent systems that handle tool use, memory, recovery, long horizons, and human oversight.\n\nDeployment and adoption decisions, plus reusable artifacts carried back to Prime's research, engineering, and product teams.\n\nRequirements\nRelevant experience: customer-embedded technical work, research engineering, technical founding experience, applied ML consulting with real build ownership, or end-to-end post-training programs.\n\nYou should be comfortable with senior external teams and able to connect experimental evidence to business decisions without lowering the research bar.\n\nHands-on experience building and debugging model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation, or closely adjacent experimental loops.\n\nStrong experimental judgment: meaningful baselines, careful trace inspection, clear failure attribution, and a willingness to change direction when the evidence changes.\n\nStrong Python and the ability to build artifacts that other researchers and engineers can run, inspect, and extend.\n\nComfort owning ambiguous problems and keeping partners and teammates current as you resolve them.\n\nEvidence of exceptional work\nWe value publications, open-source systems, benchmarks, and shipped products as evidence of exceptional work. Show us something difficult you built, what failed, and how the evidence changed your approach.\nBenefits and Perks\nCash Compensation Range of $150-300k + equity incentives\n\nFlexible Work (San Francisco, New York, London, or remote)\n\nVisa Sponsorship & relocation support\n\nProfessional Development budget\n\nTeam Off-sites & conference attendance\n\nIf you're excited about the opportunity to build the foundation for the future of decentralized AI and create a platform that empowers developers and researchers to push the boundaries of what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5404,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Flexible schedule","Professional development"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Reinforcement Learning","Foundation Models","AI Compute & Inference","AI Development Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-19T18:13:51Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":14,"expected_fill_days":98,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-03T05:54:40Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":300000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/prime-intellect-applied-research-forward-deployed-rl","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/prime-intellect-applied-research-forward-deployed-rl.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-03T10:17:56Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":14293,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-04T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":5907},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5907"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fprime-intellect-applied-research-forward-deployed-rl"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fprime-intellect-applied-research-forward-deployed-rl"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fprime-intellect-applied-research-forward-deployed-rl"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/prime-intellect-applied-research-forward-deployed-rl\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fprime-intellect-applied-research-forward-deployed-rl"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":2867457}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"primeintellect.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":2867457},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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