Research Engineer, RL Engineering

About the role

You want to build the cutting-edge systems that train AI models like Claude. You're excited to work at the frontier of machine learning, implementing and improving advanced techniques to create ever more capable, reliable, and steerable AI. As an ML Systems Engineer on our Reinforcement Learning Engineering team, you'll be responsible for the critical algorithms and infrastructure that our researchers depend on to train models. Your work will directly enable breakthroughs in AI capabilities and safety. You'll focus obsessively on improving the performance, robustness, and usability of these systems so our research can progress as quickly as possible. You're energized by the challenge of supporting and empowering our research team in the mission to build beneficial AI systems.

Our finetuning researchers train our production Claude models, and internal research models, using RLHF and other related methods. Your job will be to build, maintain, and improve the algorithms and systems that these researchers use to train models. You’ll be responsible for improving the speed, reliability, and ease-of-use of these systems.

Responsibilities

• Profile our reinforcement learning pipeline to find opportunities for improvement
• Build a system that regularly launches training jobs in a test environment so that we can quickly detect problems in the training pipeline
• Make changes to our finetuning systems so they work on new model architectures
• Build instrumentation to detect and eliminate Python GIL contention in our training code
• Diagnose why training runs have started slowing down after some number of steps, and fix it
• Implement a stable, fast version of a new training algorithm proposed by a researcher

Qualifications

You may be a good fit if you have:

• 4+ years of software engineering experience
• Like working on systems and tools that make other people more productive
• Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Pick up slack, even if it goes outside your job description
• Enjoy pair programming (we love to pair!)
• Want to learn more about machine learning research
• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• High performance, large scale distributed systems
• Large scale LLM training
• Python
• Implementing LLM finetuning algorithms, such as RLHF

Pay

Annual Salary: $500,000—$850,000 USD

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.