Research Engineer, Benchmarks

About the Role Join a small, highly technical team of researchers and engineers — including International Olympiad medalists and published AI researchers — at an early-stage startup building high-quality benchmarks to evaluate frontier AI agents on realistic, domain-specific workflows. As a Research Engineer, Benchmarks , you'll own the design and implementation of evaluations that frontier labs and enterprise customers rely on to measure real-world agent performance. This is a critical, high-ownership role at the intersection of research rigor and engineering execution. The company operates in the AI/ML evaluation and reinforcement learning infrastructure space, providing a platform for building, running, and scaling RL environments and post-training datasets. The team is based in San Francisco, CA and works on-site. Visa sponsorship is available. What You'll Do Design, implement, and own the quality of internal benchmarks for evaluating frontier agents on domain-specific tasks. Partner with subject-matter experts to define realistic workflows and tasks for domain-specific evaluations. Build reliable infrastructure to run models and agents against benchmark tasks at scale. Develop metrics and statistical analyses that measure benchmark difficulty, reliability, and failure modes. Validate that benchmark performance correlates with real-world evaluations, customer needs, and frontier lab expectations. Write clear documentation and benchmark reports that make results legible and credible to technical audiences. What We're Looking For Required 2–4 years of experience in research engineering, ML engineering, or related roles — with a focus on building and delivering AI benchmarks, evaluation infrastructure, or agent environments. Demonstrated experience designing, implementing, and running benchmarks or evaluation environments for AI agents or large language models. Strong proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments for building research or production infrastructure. Experience building and operating infrastructure to reliably run AI models or agents against benchmark or evaluation tasks at scale. Experience developing metrics, statistical analyses, or validation studies to assess benchmark difficulty, reliability, and real-world correlation. Experience collaborating with subject-matter experts to translate domain workflows into benchmark tasks and evaluation criteria. Experience analyzing workflows across diverse technical or business domains to inform task design. Strong technical writing skills — able to produce benchmark reports and documentation for research and engineering audiences. Nice to Have Published papers or technical blog posts on AI benchmarking, model evaluation, or model failure modes. Experience with reinforcement learning training pipelines, data generation, or RL agent evaluation. Background at frontier AI labs, research institutions, or involvement in widely used public benchmark projects. Traits We Value Deep curiosity about how workflows operate across varied domains. Sharp attention to detail — a habit of spotting subtle inconsistencies and edge cases in task design. Ability to reason from first principles about task design, scoring, and failure modes. Comfort thriving in unstructured problem spaces and working independently in a fast-paced, early-stage environment. Excellent communication skills for collaborating across time zones and with technical teams. Compensation & Benefits Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually, depending on experience. Early-stage equity participation. Visa sponsorship available. Location This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA, United States . Candidates must be willing and able to work from the office. Fully remote arrangements are not available for this position.