Member of Technical Staff - Research

Polymath Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive health insurance

Free meals with the team

Free Bay Club membership

Commuter benefits

401(k)

Unlimited PTO

Top of the line tech

Team activities

Job summary

Polymath Labs is hiring a Founding Member of Technical Staff - Research to push the frontier of autonomous agents. You will work on long-horizon evaluation, agent post-training, and environment design, wearing multiple hats from building benchmarks to running rigorous experiments.

Join the founding team to solve hard open-ended problems at the intersection of research and engineering, publishing results and shaping the direction of our core research agenda.

Qualifications

• Strong engineering and research fundamentals with AI tooling experience.
• Experience post-training frontier models.
• Track record of publications.

Responsibilities

• Develop an advanced environment simulation engine for training and evaluating autonomous AI agents.
• Investigate failure modes of frontier models.
• Create rigorous benchmarks for long-horizon reasoning in dynamic environments.
• Post-training agents in complex simulation environments.
• Publish research findings.

Skills

Engineering fundamentals

Research fundamentals

Publications track record

AI tooling proficiency

Tools

Production-grade code

Job description

About Polymath

Polymathisan applied research lab focused on advancing long-horizon agent capabilities through reinforcement learning. We design and scale simulation environments where agents learn to operate safely and autonomously. We work with the world’s leading model labs to push the frontier of agent capabilities. Polymath is backed by Base10, Founders Future, Y Combinator, and other incredible investors & angels. We've raised an $8M seed, and are growing out our founding team.

About the role

We’re hiring a Founding Member of Technical Staff - Research to help advance the frontier of autonomous agents. You’ll work on core research problems in long-horizon evaluation, agent post-training, and environment design, with a focus on understanding where current models fail and how to improve them. As a member of the founding team, you should expect to wear multiple hats: building benchmarks, creating environments, writing production code, and running rigorous experiments. We’re looking for people who are excited by hard open-ended problems and want to operate at the intersection of research and engineering. Examples of projects you could work on include:

• Developing an advanced environment simulation engine for training & evaluating autonomous AI agents
• Investigating failure modes of frontier models
• Creating rigorous benchmarks that evaluate how well frontier agents perform on complex, realistic tasks requiring long-horizon reasoning and tool use in dynamic environments
• Post-training agents in complex simulation environments
• Publishing research

You’ll be a good fit if you:

• Have strong engineering & research fundamentals and are a prolific user of AI tools
• Have experience post-training frontier models
• Have experience shipping reliable, production-quality code
• Have a track record of publications

Perks:

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
• Free meals with the team
• Free Bay Club membership (right next door to our Embarcadero office!)
• Commuter benefits
• 401(k)
• Unlimited PTO
• Top of the line tech
• Frequent team activities and outings

Culture:

• Polymath is a team of researchers, engineers, and operators focused on advancing the frontier of safe, superintelligent AI agents.
• We have a flat organizational structure. We believe that people do their best work when they’re self-motivated and driven by a desire to learn, contribute to the team’s goals, and advance scientific progress.
• We’re looking for folks who ship fast, set high standards for themselves, and are great team players. You’ll be a member of our founding team: have fun, learn a lot, and do high-impact work alongside great people.