Founding RL Engineer
- Market p25–p75
- $161k–$239k
- Opened · 30d
- +212
- Closed · 30d
- −221
- Opened · 7d
- +2,3656% of open
- All software engineering
- 75,172open
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.