Labelbox

Staff ML Engineer, Agent Training & Environments

Labelbox$250K — $280K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 3+ years of experience shipping reliable systems for customers and engineers.
  • Strong ability to balance high throughput without sacrificing quality.
  • Proven judgment in system and API design, including making and defending architecture decisions.
  • Experience shipping production code with coding agents regularly.
  • Expertise in building robust tooling, CI, and libraries, viewing them as core responsibilities.
  • Ability to work quickly in startup-like environments with a strong influence on decision-making.
  • Deep proficiency in Python, with flexibility across other tech stacks.

Responsibilities

  • Develop RL environments for agent-focused tasks, including task definitions and reward design.
  • Create verifiers and grading pipelines to assess agent performance programmatically.
  • Build fine-tuning pipelines from data collection to evaluation for measurable improvements.
  • Implement eval systems to run large-scale agent trajectories to assess model quality.
  • Design training and serving infrastructure to scale efficiently for frontier lab needs.

Benefits

  • Hybrid work model offering flexibility with in-office collaboration.
  • Opportunities for career growth tied to individual impact.
  • Joining a fast-paced, dynamic environment tailored for ambitious professionals.
  • Being part of a team that contributes to transformative technology development.
Full Job Description
Role Overview

Labelbox is the RL data factory for advancing frontier agent capabilities. We build the data, environments, and evaluations that frontier labs use to train and judge their agents.

This role sits where training meets infrastructure. You will run the experiments and build the systems that run them: environments agents act in, verifiers that decide whether they succeeded, and the fine-tuning pipelines that turn that signal into a better model. We're looking for someone who does both halves - the engineering throughput of a strong platform engineer, and real depth in post-training agents.

The bar is high: engineers with strong judgment who set technical direction, turn prototypes into reliable systems fast, and are at the frontier of agent-first engineering practice.

What you'll work on
  • RL environments for agentic tasks: task definitions, tool surfaces, state and reset semantics, reward design - and the harness that runs thousands of them in parallel.
  • Verifiers and graders: programmatic checks, LLM judges, rubric pipelines, pass[redacted] scoring. Deciding what "the agent succeeded" means, and making that judgment trustworthy at scale.
  • Fine-tuning pipelines that turn evaluation signals into measurable agent improvements - SFT and RL, from data collection through training to checkpoint evaluation.
  • Eval systems that run millions of agent trajectories to measure model and product quality.
  • Training and serving infrastructure that scales to the throughput frontier labs need: multi-launcher orchestration, long-running job fault tolerance, cost accounting.
What we're looking for

As an engineer
  • A 3+ year track record of shipping systems that customers and other engineers still rely on.
  • Exceptional throughput, without the quality tax. You ship a lot, you review a lot, and the v1 you ship becomes the foundation the rest of the team builds on.
  • Strong system and API design judgment. Hard architecture calls land with you: you make them, defend them under pressure, and update fast when someone else is right.
  • You ship production code with coding agents daily. You know where they break and what it takes to make them reliable, and you use that to move the whole team faster.
  • You build the substrate other people's work runs on - tooling, CI, harnesses, libraries - and you treat that as the job, not a distraction from it.
  • You move fast in ambiguous, startup-pace environments, with influence over authority.
  • Deep proficiency in Python, and comfort across the rest of the stack.

As an RL post-training practitioner
  • You have fine-tuned models for agentic tasks and made them measurably better. SFT plus at least one RL method (GRPO, PPO, DPO, or similar) in production.
  • You have built environments agents operate in, and you know why reward and task design is where most of the difficulty actually lives.
  • You have designed verifiers or graders for open-ended work, and you know how they get gamed.
  • You debug training runs forensically and methodically.
  • You reason about compute-economics. You know what an experiment costs, when a run is not worth finishing, and how to get the same signal for a tenth of the spend.
  • You write up what you learned so it changes what the team does next.


Nice to have
  • Experience with agent harnesses and coding agents as subjects of training and evaluation.
  • Multi-tenancy and isolation for untrusted agent execution: sandboxing, egress control, credential handling.
  • Background in production distributed systems, ML infrastructure, or data systems at scale.
  • Experience working directly with frontier labs or other highly technical customers.


Our Technology Stack

Our engineering team works with a modern tech stack designed for scalability, performance, and developer efficiency:
  • Frontend: React.js with Redux, TypeScript
  • Backend: Node.js, TypeScript, Python, some Java & Kotlin
  • APIs: GraphQL
  • Cloud & Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes
  • Databases: MySQL, Spanner, PostgreSQL
  • Queueing / Streaming: Kafka, PubSub


Labelbox strives to ensure pay parity across the organization and discuss compensation transparently. The expected annual base salary range for United States-based candidates is below. This range is not inclusive of any potential equity packages or additional benefits. Exact compensation varies based on a variety of factors, including skills and competencies, experience, and geographical location.

Annual base salary range

$250,000-$280,000 USD

Life at Labelbox
  • Location: Join our dedicated tech hub in San Francisco
  • Work Style: Hybrid model with 3 days per week in office, combining collaboration and flexibility
  • Environment: Fast-paced and high-intensity, perfect for ambitious individuals who thrive on ownership and quick decision-making
  • Growth: Career advancement opportunities directly tied to your impact
  • Vision: Be part of building the foundation for humanity's most transformative technology

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