Member of Technical Staff - Machine Learning Capabilities, New Graduates

Preference Model; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 165,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive cash and equity compensation

Health, vision, dental benefits

401K match

Lunch provided everyday onsite

Weekly snack orders

Visa sponsorship & relocation support available

Job summary

Preference Model in Seattle is seeking a new graduate Machine Learning Engineer to design and build reinforcement learning environments. This role combines research and engineering, requiring up-to-date knowledge and innovative coding skills.

The ideal candidate will have solid Python skills, strong problem-solving abilities, and a passion for machine learning. Competitive compensation and benefits are offered, along with ownership in a dynamic startup environment.

Qualifications

• Strong ML fundamentals and broad research interests.
• Smart problem solvers who drive solutions end-to-end.
• Passion for staying current with rapidly evolving ML infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design and build RL environments and reward schemes.
• Collaborate to brainstorm and create new ideas.
• Deliver work into production training runs.

Skills

Proficiency in Python

Systems Programming

Problem Solving

Knowledge of PyTorch or JAX

Education

PhD or MS in relevant field

Tools

CUDA

Triton

Pallas

Job description

About Us

Preference Model is building automated ML research engineering. Existing frontier models are brittle when applied to real-world ML tasks. The present bottleneck is the lack of high-quality RL training environments. Our first step is to build RL environments that reflect real-world complexity, with diverse tasks and robust reward functions. Our founding team has previous experience on Anthropic’s data team building data infrastructure, and datasets behind Claude. We are partnering with leading AI labs to push AI closer to achieving its transformative potential.

About The Role

We’re hiring new graduate Machine Learning Engineers to design and build reinforcement learning environments to safely advance model capabilities specifically on machine learning research and engineering tasks to do the work of an MLE at a frontier lab.

This role blends research and engineering. It will require you to stay up to date with the latest research, develop novel approaches, and realize them in code. You will have full ownership and autonomy of the environments you build. Your work will include designing and implementing RL environments, conducting experiments and evaluations, delivering your work into production training runs, and collaborating with other researchers and engineers.

You will join our Capabilities org, a small, high-ownership team and contribute directly to the data layer that powers frontier LLM capability.

What You Will Do

• Design and build RL environments and reward schemes that produce clean, learnable signals for frontier models on ML research and engineering tasks.
• Build deep expertise across the frontier of ML research, training, and inference infrastructure.
• Collaborate with others to brainstorm and create new ideas and tools to improve the environment building process.

What We are Looking For (Qualifications)

• You have strong ML fundamentals and broad research interests. You read many papers or tutorials, understand topics deeply and have the creativity to translate them into RLVR problems.
• Proficiency in Python and systems programming; ideally PyTorch or JAX
• Smart problem solvers who take ownership and drives solutions end-to-end
• Passion for staying current with the rapidly evolving ML infrastructure landscape
• Ability to meet throughput expectations and respond quickly to feedback

Nice to have

• Expert knowledge in an active DL/ML research area, with publications or public code to show for it. Research experience (PhD, MS) is a big plus.
• Deep understanding of transformer internals
• Strong expertise in kernel development (CUDA, Triton, Pallas), optimizing non-trivial neural modules to specific hardware
• Research projects, coursework, or personal work involving RL environments (any framework, any scale)
• Open-source contributions to ML infrastructure or RL tooling
• Experience with any cloud platform (AWS, GCP, Azure) or infrastructure-as-code tools

What we offer

• Competitive cash and equity compensation (>90th percentile)
• Ownership and autonomy in a fast moving startup environment
• Opportunity to work with top machine learning engineers
• Health, vision, dental, benefits
• 401K match
• Lunch provided everyday onsite
• Weekly snack orders
• Visa sponsorship & relocation support available

We value diverse perspectives and experiences. If you're excited about this role but don't check every box, we still encourage you to apply.

Compensation Range: $165K - $200K