Founding RL Engineer

About the Role

Join an early-stage AI company as its first engineering hire, building reinforcement learning environments and AI agents. You will work closely with the co-founders, shape technical direction, and help grow the engineering team.

What You'll Do

• Build reinforcement learning environments and tasks using voice and enterprise data.

• Develop and deploy AI agents for enterprise customers.

• Partner with the co-founders on technical direction and product roadmaps.

• Lead engineering as the team grows, balancing fast delivery with high-quality work.

What We're Looking For

• Typically 3 or more years of experience in reinforcement learning or AI agent development, or 6 to 12 months building RL environments or data as a recent graduate.

• Experience building coding RL environments and shipping AI agents into production, with strong reinforcement learning fundamentals.

• Professional experience with Python and PyTorch or JAX, and hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code or Cursor.

• Experience training models with policy gradient methods, reward modeling, RLHF, or related approaches.

• Full-stack experience with TypeScript and AWS; experience with mobile development, distributed training, GPU infrastructure, or LLM post-training is a plus.

• Familiarity with environment frameworks such as Gymnasium, Ray RLlib, Isaac, or MuJoCo, and training libraries such as TRL, verl, or OpenRLHF is helpful.

• Strong shipping record in a startup or AI lab environment; a related degree or relevant open-source work or publications is valued.

• Must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship and willing to relocate to San Francisco for an in-person 5.5-day work week.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary is $125,000 to $200,000 annually. OTE (on-target earnings, base plus variable) is $225,000 to $400,000. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California. The role follows a 5.5-day work week.