Member of Technical Staff - Research / Post-Training

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

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: $200–275k

• Equity: 0.15–0.30%
• Location: San Francisco, in-person

Lead our in-house research and post-training efforts.

Responsibilities

• Train open-source frontier models on our in-house environments to validate quality and build research insights.
• Lead our public-facing benchmark and leaderboard efforts for frontier models.
• Publish findings in blogs and papers to share with the broader research community.
• Contribute to core platform engineering as needed — AI tooling, data collection pipelines, partnering with environment and reward designers.
• Build our engineering team culture from the ground up.

You should have

• Experience in model post-training.
• Experience publishing papers and sharing open research.
• Familiarity building evaluations, benchmarks, or RL for AI agents.
• Startup speed: iterate quick, ask quick, respond quick.
• Strong product and user ownership.
• Client-facing comfort — you'll talk to users, customers, and SMEs.

Nice to have

• 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.