Founding Research Engineer - RL & Benchmarking

Scion Staffing, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding Engineering Opportunity

Cutting-Edge AI Work

Leadership Growth

Job summary

Scion Technology is seeking a Founding Research Engineer to join an early-stage AI startup in San Francisco, onsite, driving RL research and post-training evaluations. You will work directly with frontier AI labs to create RL tasks, build benchmarks, and evaluate cutting-edge AI models, with substantial ownership of technical projects and the potential to lead as the company grows.

The role requires hands-on engineering, research-driven experimentation, and the ability to translate complex

Qualifications

• Strong foundational understanding of reinforcement learning, coding RL, model evaluations, benchmarks, evaluation harnesses, and AI post-training.
• Ability to combine research intuition with hands-on engineering to design, build, and evaluate technical solutions.
• Experience with RL tasks, model evaluations, post-training workflows, or related AI research through professional work, academic research, or independent projects.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and implement coding reinforcement learning evaluations, tasks, and task creation pipelines.
• Build and enhance RealSuite, evaluating frontier AI models against benchmarks and representative coding tasks.
• Collaborate directly with leading frontier AI labs to develop RL tasks tailored to their research and training needs.
• Develop evaluation harnesses, benchmarks, and testing methodologies to assess model performance.
• Work closely with customers to understand technical requirements, ensure quality, and deliver solutions that meet project specifications.
• Combine research-driven experimentation with hands-on engineering to improve evaluation and post-training workflows.
• Take ownership of technical projects from initial research and design through implementation and delivery.
• Contribute to the growth of the engineering organization, with the opportunity to build and lead a team as the company scales.

Skills

Reinforcement learning

Model evaluations

Evaluation harnesses

Post-training AI workflows

Ownership of projects

Tools

RealSuite

Job description

Scion Technology is seeking a Founding Research Engineer to join an early-stage AI startup in San Francisco, onsite, driving RL research and post-training evaluations. You will work directly with frontier AI labs to create RL tasks, build benchmarks, and evaluate cutting-edge AI models, with substantial ownership of technical projects and the potential to lead as the company grows.

The role requires hands-on engineering, research-driven experimentation, and the ability to translate complex