{"id":2728210,"url":"https://alion.io/job/prime-intellect-research-engineer-scientist-reinforcement-learning","title":"Research Engineer / Scientist - Reinforcement Learning","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":33,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":98,"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","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"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":150000,"max":350000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":350000},"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":"LangChain","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"OpenRouter","optional":false},{"name":"Perplexity","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Together AI","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false},{"name":"Zapier","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-16T13:54:28Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-16","last_verified_at":"2026-10-20T22:39:11Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"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\nHelp develop the algorithms and systems used to train Prime Intellect’s open models with reinforcement learning. We’re hiring research engineers and scientists across RL algorithms, scaling research, and training frameworks. Your focus will reflect your strengths; you don’t need to cover all three.\nResponsibilities\nAlgorithm research\nDevelop and test RL methods for reasoning, coding, and long-horizon tasks, including changes to training objectives and policy optimization.\n\nInvestigate stability in asynchronous RL, including policy staleness, trainer/sampler mismatch, and numerical differences between training and rollouts.\n\nWork with data and evaluation researchers to understand how task selection, rewards, and training data affect what the model learns.\n\nScaling science\nDesign experiments to understand how RL performance and learning dynamics change with model size, training compute, and task horizon.\n\nUse controlled ablations and evaluations to distinguish learning gains from reward exploitation, evaluation artifacts, or training bugs.\n\nTurn experimental findings into training recipes, then test whether the improvements hold across larger models and longer runs.\n\nRL frameworks\nExtend prime-rl to support new algorithms, models, and asynchronous training workflows.\n\nImprove the performance and numerical correctness of research runs across trainers, rollout workers, and environments, working with the infrastructure team.\n\nBuild diagnostics that make unstable runs and performance regressions easier to reproduce, and help distinguish algorithm problems from implementation or runtime issues.\n\nRequirements\nDemonstrated depth in at least one of RL algorithms, empirical research on model training, or distributed ML systems. This could come through research, open-source contributions, or systems you’ve built.\n\nStrong programming skills in Python and experience with PyTorch or a comparable ML framework.\n\nAbility to design controlled experiments, interpret results, and debug unexpected model or system behavior.\n\nExperience taking a research idea or systems change through implementation, testing, and evaluation, with a clear account of what worked and what didn’t.\n\nNice to have\nExperience with distributed training frameworks or asynchronous rollout pipelines.\n\nExperience diagnosing unstable RL runs, including policy-staleness or numerical issues.\n\nWork on coding agents, verifiable rewards, or long-horizon environments.\n\nBenefits and Perks\nCash Compensation Range of $150-350k, including equity incentives, aligning your success with the growth and impact of Prime Intellect.\n\nFlexible work arrangements, with the option to work remotely or in-person at our offices in San Francisco.\n\nVisa sponsorship and relocation assistance for international candidates.\n\nQuarterly team off-sites, hackathons, conferences and learning opportunities.\n\nOpportunity to work with a talented, hard-working and mission-driven team, united by a shared passion for leveraging technology to accelerate science and AI.\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":4783,"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","Relocation assistance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Reinforcement Learning","Foundation Models","AI Compute & Inference","AI Development Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-16T17:05:24Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":98,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":350000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/prime-intellect-research-engineer-scientist-reinforcement-learning","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/prime-intellect-research-engineer-scientist-reinforcement-learning.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-21T02:41:14Z","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":3896,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-22T00:00:00Z"}},"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-research-engineer-scientist-reinforcement-learning"},{"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-research-engineer-scientist-reinforcement-learning"},{"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-research-engineer-scientist-reinforcement-learning"},{"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-research-engineer-scientist-reinforcement-learning\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fprime-intellect-research-engineer-scientist-reinforcement-learning"}]}