Turing

Staff Research Engineer - RL Gyms

Turing$250K — $350K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in Reinforcement Learning and post-training
  • Proven engineering management experience with a focus on QA and team building
  • Strong systems thinking and database/API design skills
  • Hands-on coding ability, ideally in Python and SQL
  • Demonstrated operational leadership in complex projects
  • Excellent cross-functional communication skills across diverse teams
  • Bachelor's in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field preferred

Responsibilities

  • Lead RL environment projects from inception to delivery for multiple clients
  • Ensure the quality and relevance of RL environments and their datasets
  • Build and manage a team of engineers, domain experts, and data specialists
  • Establish processes for coding, data schemas, and validation in project workflows
  • Serve as the primary contact for client relationships in RL projects
  • Collaborate with sales to convert client needs into project specifications
  • Conduct evaluations post-training to demonstrate the effectiveness of environments

Benefits

  • Collaborative and supportive work culture with a 5-day workweek
  • Opportunity to work with top talent from leading tech companies
  • Emphasis on flexible working hours
  • Strong focus on impact with real-world applications of your work
Full Job Description
What we do

Turing builds large-scale datasets and reinforcement learning (RL) environments that power post-training for the world's leading AI labs and enterprises. We create RL environments to evaluate and improve our customers' models on complex, long-range, multi-step workflows across high-GDP-value domains such as Finance, Sales, Retail, Developer Tools, Collaboration, Customer Experience.

The environments vary depending on the model capability being evaluated / improved, a few examples of environment types are listed here:
  1. Environments for Software Engineering / coding agents
  2. UI-Environments for Computer-Use/Browser-Use agents
  3. MCP-based Environments for general function-calling agents across various enterprise and consumer applications.
The Role

We are looking for a Staff Research Engineer - RL to own the end-to-end lifecycle of RL environment projects, spanning environment design, task generation, reward/verifier design, quality, and delivery to frontier AI labs and enterprise clients.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you influence revenue directly - you will be mapped to one or more AI labs and build RL environments specific to their needs. You will lead teams of engineers, subject matter experts (e.g. Finance expert, if you're building an RL environment for investment banking workflows), researchers, and data ops teammates to achieve this.

What You'll Do
  • End-to-End Ownership: Lead RL Environment projects end-to-end for one or more clients, ensuring the environment you and your team create matches the client's spec, surpasses quality expectations, and is delivered on time.
  • Data Quality: Ensure the RL environments you produce, the data that goes into those environments, and the data generated from them (e.g. agent trajectories and reward scores) meet frontier standards for realism, difficulty, diversity.
  • Team building and enablement: Work with your Ops counterparts to build the team of full-stack engineers, back-end engineers, domain experts, QAs, data creators, reviewers, and others you'll need to deliver the environment on time. You'll interview, hire, onboard, train, retain talent for your team
  • Process Leadership: Set the process that each of the above team members follows to generate environment code, database schemas, seed data, tasks, and verifiers; set up quality rubrics, automated validation scripts, and human-in-the-loop review processes for every aspect of the environment and data for the environment.
  • Customer Interaction: Own customer relationships for your RL Environment project(s), and act as the primary point of contact for leading AI labs, providing regular updates, asking for feedback, and identifying opportunities to grow project scope and revenue.
  • Sales & Solutioning: participate in client solutioning conversations alongside our sales teammates; understand the needs of researchers at AI labs, translate those needs into environment goals
  • Evals & Post-training: Demonstrate proof of value for your environments by running inhouse RL fine tuning experiments to measure model performance lifts on agent trajectories; or by producing eval reports of frontier models on your environment and tasks


Who We're Looking For
  • RL & Post-training experience: familiarity with RL fine tuning, verifier/reward design, and/or environment design
  • Engineering Management experience: have led teams of engineers in the past, including interviewing/hiring them and setting up QA processes.
  • Systems thinking + Database/API design: ability to 'simulate' the data schema and API interface of a consumer or business application
  • Hands-on technical capability: willing to write code along with the team you're managing; Python and SQL experience preferred
  • Operational leadership: Proven ability to manage complex data pipelines, multi-stakeholder delivery, and concurrent high-stakes projects.
  • Cross-functional communicator: ability to communicate clearly with researchers at frontier AI labs, subject matter experts for various domains, and diverse teams.
  • Background in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related technical field preferred.

Why Turing
  • Work directly with the world's leading AI labs and enterprises at the cutting edge of RL environment design and post-training.
  • Real impact: your environments will be used to evaluate and train frontier models on GDP-moving tasks across real-world domains
  • Talent-dense team, where you'll find high autonomy, rapid iteration, and rapid learning curve


Compensation
  • $250,000 to $350,000 OTE + Equity

Values
  • We are client first: We put our clients at the center of everything we do, because their success is the ultimate measure of our value.
  • We work at Start-Up Speed: We move fast, stay agile and favor action because momentum is the foundation of perfection
  • We are AI forward: We help our clients build the future of Al and implement it in our own roles and workflow to amplify productivity.
Advantages of joining Turing

  • Amazing work culture (Super collaborative & supportive work environment; 5 days a week)
  • Awesome colleagues (Surround yourself with top talent from Meta, Google, LinkedIn etc. as well as people with deep startup experience)
  • Competitive compensation
  • Flexible working hours

About Turing

Turing is a technology company that provides a platform for companies to hire remote software developers. The company's platform uses artificial intelligence to match companies with developers who have the skills and experience they need. Turing was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company has raised $32 million in funding to date.
Learn more about Turing
Size
200 employees
Industry
Founded
2018

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