Staff Applied Research Engineer

About the role

The OpenPipe team at CoreWeave is building tools to help agents learn from experience. This is a critical step to make agents reliable enough to perform long tasks autonomously, in the same way human employees are. We're systematically identifying and solving the major bottlenecks between today's tech and those future self-improving agents.

Responsibilities

• Generate and investigate research ideas towards solving the remaining obstacles to continuous learning in production.
• Work with the broader OpenPipe team to validate these research directions across real customer tasks.
• Utilize the best tool for the job when building and deploying production services, including writing custom code and leveraging others' work.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in machine learning or applied research, or a PhD with 4+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Deep expertise in LLM post-training, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, on-policy distillation, reward modeling, and policy optimization.
• Strong research judgment, including the ability to identify high-impact problems, design rigorous experiments, and make decisions from ambiguous results.
• Proven ability to set technical direction, lead complex cross-functional initiatives, and mentor other engineers.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated success developing LLM training methods or systems that produce meaningful improvements on real-world tasks.
• Experience taking research ideas from initial hypothesis through implementation, evaluation, and production deployment.
• Preferred qualifications include publications, open source contributions, or other demonstrated research impact in reinforcement learning, LLM post-training, or agent learning.
• Deep experience with distributed training, GPU optimization, and large-scale model training systems.

Skills

Strong research judgment, technical leadership, and hands-on experience with machine learning and applied research.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance - 100% paid by CoreWeave.
• Company-paid Life Insurance.
• Voluntary supplemental life insurance.
• Short and long-term disability insurance.
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA).
• Health Savings Account (HSA).
• Tuition Reimbursement.
• Ability to participate in Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP).
• Mental Wellness Benefits through Spring Health.
• Family-Forming support provided by Carrot.
• Paid Parental Leave.
• Flexible, full-service childcare support with Kinside.
• 401(k) with a generous employer match.
• Catered lunch each day in our office and data center locations.
• A casual work environment.
• A work culture focused on innovative disruption.

Pay

The base salary range for this role is $207,000 to $275,000. The starting salary will be determined based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and market location.

Schedule

We strive for both market alignment and internal equity when determining compensation. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package includes a discretionary bonus, equity awards, and a comprehensive benefits program (all based on eligibility).