Lead Research Engineer, Frontier Models & Benchmarks

Halluminate; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Relocation stipend

401(k) match

Free meals

Gym membership

Transportation benefits

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

Halluminate, a San Francisco-based applied AI and data company, seeks a lead researcher to head in-house post-training and research efforts for frontier models used in finance workloads. You will train models, publish findings, drive benchmarks, contribute to platform tooling, and help build a high-performance engineering culture from the ground up, with a focus on research quality and real-world impact.

This in-person, SF-based role offers a base salary of $200–275k plus equity and relocation

Qualifications

• Experience training/post-training models and evaluating their performance.
• Proven track record publishing papers and open research.
• Familiarity with evaluating benchmarks or RL for AI agents.
• Ability to move quickly in a startup environment and iterate rapidly.
• Strong ownership of product outcomes and user needs.
• Comfort communicating with users, customers and SMEs.

Responsibilities

• Train open-source frontier models on in-house environments to validate quality and gain insights.
• Lead public benchmarks and leaderboard efforts for frontier models.
• Publish findings in blogs and papers for the research community.
• Contribute to core platform engineering, AI tooling, data pipelines, and collaboration with environment and reward designers.
• Help build and shape the engineering team culture from the ground up.

Skills

Post-training models

Research publications

RL evaluations/benchmarks

Startup speed

Product ownership

Client-facing

Job description

Halluminate, a San Francisco-based applied AI and data company, seeks a lead researcher to head in-house post-training and research efforts for frontier models used in finance workloads. You will train models, publish findings, drive benchmarks, contribute to platform tooling, and help build a high-performance engineering culture from the ground up, with a focus on research quality and real-world impact.

This in-person, SF-based role offers a base salary of $200–275k plus equity and relocation