ML Research Engineer - Creative AI & Subjective Quality

Coders Connect; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful early-stage equity

Creative working environment

Job summary

An early-stage AI company in San Francisco is seeking a Machine Learning Research Engineer to own end-to-end research cycles. The role involves training models across creative domains, developing evaluation benchmarks, and collaborating with creative experts and AI labs. The ideal candidate will have 2-6+ years of experience in ML research, strong skills in Python and PyTorch, and a curiosity for subjective AI. This position offers a competitive salary of $200K–$350K and opportunities for equity in the company.

Qualifications

• 2-6+ years in post-training, ML research, or ML engineering.
• Strong experience with Python, PyTorch, LLMs, and multimodal models.
• Proven ability to run fast, iterative experiments from data to evaluation.
• Curiosity for subjective AI—creativity, tone, and aesthetics.
• Low-ego, collaborative mindset; thrives in a small, in-person environment.

Responsibilities

• Train reward models, classifiers, and verifiers across creative domains.
• Develop benchmarks and evaluation methods for subjective tasks.
• Run post-training (RLHF/DPO) experiments on open-source and proprietary models.
• Collaborate with AI labs and creative experts on pilots and research projects.
• Publish findings through blogs and whitepapers.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

LLMs

Multimodal models

Data evaluation

Iterative experimentation

Subjective AI

Job description

An early-stage AI company in San Francisco is seeking a Machine Learning Research Engineer to own end-to-end research cycles. The role involves training models across creative domains, developing evaluation benchmarks, and collaborating with creative experts and AI labs. The ideal candidate will have 2-6+ years of experience in ML research, strong skills in Python and PyTorch, and a curiosity for subjective AI. This position offers a competitive salary of $200K–$350K and opportunities for equity in the company.