Applied Researcher – Forward-Deployed RL

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of applied Reinforcement Learning (RL) initiatives from vague customer challenges through to implemented improvement loops.

• Grasp workflows and business implications, establish measurable outcomes, and develop research plans.

• Create environments, evaluations, baselines, and reward signals.

• Execute RL, distillation, and other post-training experiments against authentic baselines.

• Design agent systems that incorporate tool usage, memory, recovery, prolonged timelines, and human oversight.

• Diagnose whether improvements or setbacks stem from the model, data, harness, inference, or infrastructure.

• Transition successful experiments to deployment and assess customer outcomes.

• Determine which artifacts should evolve into reusable environments, recipes, data loops, platform capabilities, or collective research.

• Collaborate directly with customer researchers, engineers, leaders, users, and research partners.

• Convey deployment and adoption decisions to research, engineering, and product teams.

⛳️ Requirements

• Relevant experience in customer-integrated technical roles, research engineering, technical founding, applied machine learning consulting with genuine build ownership, or comprehensive post-training programs.

• Proficient in engaging with senior external teams and linking experimental evidence to business strategies.

• Practical experience in building and troubleshooting model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation, or closely related experimental loops.

• Strong experimental acumen, including the establishment of meaningful baselines, meticulous trace examination, and clear failure attribution.

• Proficient in Python and capable of constructing artifacts that can be executed, inspected, and extended by other researchers and engineers.

• Comfortable taking ownership of ambiguous challenges and keeping partners and team members informed.

• Evidence of outstanding work demonstrated through publications, open-source systems, benchmarks, or delivered products.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity incentives.

• Flexible working arrangements (San Francisco, New York, London, or remote).

• Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance.

• Professional development budget.

• Team off-sites and conference participation.