Member of Technical Staff — RL Research (Experienced)

About the role

This role is broader than a traditional RL algorithm role. You will be expected to understand modern post-training methods and build the infrastructure needed to run them at scale. The work spans RL method development, rollout generation, reward modeling, policy optimization, evaluation, data feedback loops, serving, observability, and distributed execution.

What You’ll Own

• Build Nuance’s RL/post-training stack from 0→1: rollout generation, policy optimization, reward/reference model serving, data feedback loops, evaluation, checkpointing, observability, and debugging.
• Develop and scale post-training methods such as PPO, GRPO, DPO, rejection sampling, RLHF/RLAIF, online RL, and model-based data improvement.
• Design the systems abstractions that connect research ideas to production-scale RL runs: trainers, rollout workers, reward models, evaluators, data queues, experience buffers, and checkpoint promotion.
• Build evaluation and feedback loops for omni behavior: turn-taking, interruption, timing, emotional response, audiovisual coherence, instruction following, and real-time interaction quality.
• Optimize the end-to-end post-training loop across rollout throughput, serving latency, GPU utilization, policy update efficiency, queueing, checkpoint overhead, and research iteration speed.
• Evolve the platform as algorithms, model architectures, reward definitions, data sources, and evaluation methods change.

What We’re Looking For

• Significant hands-on experience with RL, RLHF, RLAIF, post-training, alignment, or large-scale fine-tuning for modern foundation models.
• Deep understanding of RL/post-training methods: policy optimization, reward modeling, preference optimization, rejection sampling, KL control, evaluation, and data feedback loops.
• A track record reasoning about model behavior and training dynamics: reward hacking, unstable rewards, distribution shift, stale policies, mode collapse, over-optimization, noisy preferences, and evaluation mismatch.
• Proven experience building or operating RL/post-training pipelines at scale with frameworks such as verl, ms-swift, OpenRLHF, or equivalent internal systems, including integration with rollout serving systems such as vLLM.
• Experience with large-scale training or inference systems, including rollout generation, model serving, batching, queueing, GPU utilization, checkpointing, and debugging.
• Understanding of omni post-training for real-time audio-video-language interaction: temporal alignment, interruption, emotional response, and multimodal evaluation.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, curiosity, and adaptability to new RL algorithms, model architectures, serving systems, evaluation methods, and research ideas.

Bonus Points

• Prior 0→1 experience building post-training systems, RL pipelines, agent training systems, evaluation platforms, or large-scale model improvement loops.
• Experience with PPO, GRPO, DPO, online RL, RLHF/RLAIF, reward modeling, preference data, synthetic data generation, or model-based data improvement.
• Experience with omni or multimodal post-training for audio-video-language models, especially long-context or real-time interactive systems.
• Experience scaling mixed training/inference workloads across large GPU clusters.
• Experience with adjacent areas such as distributed pretraining, data infrastructure, inference serving, simulation, human/AI feedback collection, or evaluation infrastructure.
• Publishations or substantial open-source contributions in RL, post-training, alignment, evaluation, ML systems, or model behavior.

Compensation

$300,000 – $500,000 base salary, plus meaningful equity. We think long-term ownership matters and structure equity accordingly.

Logistics

• Location: In-person in Seattle, five days a week — we believe in the compounding value of working shoulder-to-shoulder.
• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas (O-1, H-1B, green card) from day one.
• AI-native tooling: Do your best work with the best tools, including unlimited tokens.

Benefits

• Health: HSA plan with ~$2,000 in annual company contributions — roughly 2x what most big tech companies put in.
• Time off: 15 days of PTO plus public holidays, and we close the office for a full week at year-end.
• Food: Lunch, drinks, and snacks on us every workday — the small thing that quietly makes the day better.
• Commuter benefits: We help cover the cost of getting to the office.
• 401(k): In the works.

Nuance Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better AI.