Founding Member of Technical Staff - Platform Engineering

Halluminate; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

Relocation stipend

401(k) match

Food (breakfast, lunch, dinner)

Health and gym membership

Transportation (Uber/Waymo rides)

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Halluminate is hiring for a platform engineering role in San Francisco to own and build frontier RL environments and the supporting engineering org from the ground up. You will lead development of training and inference infrastructure to serve real customer usage at scale and shape the next generation of RL environments.

The role emphasizes strong product ownership, ability to prioritize across a large roadmap, and direct interaction with users and SMEs.

Qualifications

• Familiarity with evaluating AI or RL systems and benchmarks.
• Ability to move quickly in a startup environment and iterate rapidly.
• Strong ownership of product and user outcomes across a large roadmap.
• Comfort communicating with users, customers, and SMEs.

Responsibilities

• Build RL environment training and inference infrastructure for customer use at scale.
• Research and develop longer-horizon RL environments for frontier models.
• Develop software to dramatically improve the quality and throughput of RL environment creation.
• Innovate on synthetic data pipelines to produce realistic problems.
• Create platform analytics for environment cost, usage hours, bottlenecks, and SME management.
• Craft domain-specific verifiers for rewards in decks, Excel modeling, and quantitative trading.
• Establish engineering culture and practices from the ground up.

Skills

RL familiarity

Startup speed

Product ownership

Client-facing

Job description

About Halluminate

Halluminate is an applied AI and data company building computer-use and tool-use RL gyms to train AI agents on real financial services work — Excel modeling, pitch decks, and everything investment banking, private equity, and hedge funds rely on. We work with frontier labs, graduated from Y Combinator (S25), and raised a seed round to scale the team.

The role

Base: $150–250k · Equity: 0.25–0.5% · Location: San Francisco, 5 days in office

Own platform engineering, develop frontier long-horizon RL environments, and help build our engineering org from the ground up.

Responsibilities

• Build our RL environment training and inference infrastructure to support customer usage at scale.
• Research and develop next-generation RL environments — increasingly realistic, long-horizon, and difficult for frontier models.
• Build software that 10–100x\'s the quality and throughput of RL environment creation.
• Innovate on synthetic data pipelines to create realistic problems.
• Build platform analytics for environment cost, hours, bottlenecks, and SME management.
• Craft domain-specific verifiers (verifiable rewards for decks, Excel modeling, quantitative trading, and beyond).
• Establish engineering culture and practices from the ground up.

You should have

• Familiarity building evaluations, benchmarks, or RL for AI agents.
• Startup speed: iterate quick, ask quick, respond quick, make mistakes quick.
• Strong product and user ownership; ability to prioritize across a large roadmap.
• Client-facing comfort — you\'ll talk to users, customers, and SMEs.

Nice to have

• Research background (training models, publishing papers).
• Former founders or experience at early-stage startups.

What we offer

• Healthcare — Fully covered medical, dental, and vision for you. Subsidized for dependents.
• Relocation — $10k+ relocation stipend to help you get to San Francisco.
• 401(k) — Up to 4% employer match.
• Food — Free breakfast, lunch, and dinner while working.
• Health — Free gym membership.
• Transportation — Free Ubers and Waymo rides to and from the office.
• Visa sponsorship — We sponsor visas, including H-1B.