Research Engineer / Scientist – Reinforcement Learning (RL)

About the role

As a Research Engineer/Scientist (Reinforcement Learning) at Percepta, you will work at the intersection of RL research and real-world deployment. You will advance the frontier of capabilities through research on decision-making for critical industries. You will collaborate closely with our Embedded Product Managers (EPMs) and engineers to ensure that our solutions transform how companies operate.

Role and Responsibilities

• Identify which real-world challenges are tractable for RL-guided decision making.
• Develop RL methods to perform complex tasks in domains like planning, decision-making, or optimization.
• Develop and maintain the experimental infrastructure that powers our research, from simulation environments and data pipelines to training and evaluation frameworks.
• Conduct in-the-wild evaluations at scale that drive millions of dollars in value.
• Partner with our applied AI engineers to transition successful research ideas into robust features of our Mosaic platform.
• Communicate research outcomes to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, making sure everyone understands the "so what" of research and how to apply it.

Indicators of a Good Fit

• An MS/PhD in Computer Science, ML, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• A track record of effective RL work.
• Motivated by impact in critical industries including healthcare, supply chains, energy, and finance.
• Understand how to perform rigorous RL experimentation.
• Enjoy extreme ownership.
• Believe that AI can drive transformative change in critical industries.

Technical Skills

• High performance, large scale distributed systems.
• Large scale LLM training or RL training.
• Possess strong programming skills, especially in Python.
• Implementing LLM post-training algorithms.
• Experience with vLLM/SGLang, Ray, Kubernetes (or AWS EKS).
• Experience with distributed checkpointing, multi-node, multi-gpu training, custom KV-caching.
• Experience with asynchronous training and inference, either with VeRL, ROLL, SkyRL, AReal, or with RL libraries like CleanRL.

Our Values

• Dream bigger: Take on the most ambitious problems with optimism, responsibility, and genuine belief that we can make it happen.
• Heart in the game: What we're doing matters and we have to give a shit. Internally, fix badness when you find it. Externally, honor the trust our customers place in us with their most important problems.
• Win for the customer: Everyone is an engineer and the job of an engineer is to deliver outcomes, not outputs. Everything we do—products we build, partnerships we launch, strategy we set—exists to make our customers successful. Delivery is the strategy.
• Make the call: Organizations are only as strong as the pace at which they make decisions. Everyone at Percepta should feel empowered to commit and shape the ambiguity in front of them. But "make the call" cuts both ways: make the decision and make the phone call.
• Intensity with kindness: Believe in excellence in execution, candor in feedback, ruthlessness in prioritization, and survivalist urgency. We also believe you don't need to be an asshole to deliver on any of this. The trust built through shared kindness and vulnerability is what makes the intensity sustainable.