Forward Deployed Engineer
Job Summary
We are seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to act as the technical bridge between frontier AI research labs and our internal platform team. In this role, you will engage directly with researchers from leading organizations to understand their reinforcement learning needs, translate them into production environments, and deliver custom solutions that advance multi-million dollar initiatives. This position is ideal for a high-growth oriented engineer who thrives at the intersection of customer collaboration and hands-on technical implementation in a rapidly scaling startup environment.
Essential Functions
- Participate in customer meetings with researchers at frontier AI labs to understand reinforcement learning environment requirements and translate them into technical specifications
- Build prototypes and custom environments or tooling for specific client engagements before integrating them as platform features
- Collaborate within small teams to own the technical quality, engineering delivery, and productionization of project requirements
- Maintain high quality standards for RL tasks and ensure training environments meet the requirements for advancing frontier models
- Resolve delivery blockers through integration work, technical debugging, and informed design decisions that preserve core platform integrity
Required Qualifications
- 1-5 years of experience building and shipping production code in a customer-facing or startup environment
- Hands-on experience building evaluations or RL environments for AI agents
- Strong client-facing skills with comfort leading technical discussions on a daily basis
- Deep understanding of reinforcement learning concepts and machine learning infrastructure
- Ability to work on-site in San Francisco five days per week
- Background in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics or related STEM field
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience as an early engineer or founder at a high-growth startup
- Prior work directly with AI labs on post-training data or RL environments
- Background in high-growth startups or technical consulting rather than large tech companies
- Exposure to financial services domains such as investment banking, private equity or hedge funds
- PhD in reinforcement learning with hands-on engineering experience
Technical Skills
- Python
- TypeScript
- Reinforcement Learning Environments
- Evals and Benchmarking Frameworks
- Docker
- AWS
- Next.js
- Technical debugging and systems integration
Education & Certifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics or related STEM field required. Advanced degrees or PhD in reinforcement learning strongly preferred for select candidate profiles.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary range of $200,000 to $275,000 plus significant equity in a high-growth, YC-backed company. Exact compensation will be determined based on experience and skills.