Research Engineer

Proximal; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Proximal in San Francisco and Bangalore is seeking a research engineer to tackle open-ended problems in RL, agents and data, with ownership of projects from concept to release. You will work independently and contribute to cutting-edge RL infrastructure.

We value problem solving, creativity and programming skills over formal ML credentials. Our small team shares results via open-source releases, papers and talks, and collaborates closely in an in-person setting at the North Beach office in San

Qualifications

• Strong problem solving abilities and programming skills.
• Ability to work independently on end-to-end research problems.
• Creativity in approaching ML/RL challenges and open-source sharing.

Responsibilities

• Work on open-ended research problems in RL, agents and data.
• Own problems end-to-end and share results through open-source releases, papers and talks.
• Collaborate with a small team and contribute to RL infrastructure.

Skills

Problem solving

Programming

Independence

Creativity

Tools

RL training stack

Agent harnesses

Job description

As a research engineer, you will work on open-ended research problems in the domain of RL, agents and data, and share your work with the public through open-source releases, papers and talks. We are a small team, which means that you will own problems end-to-end and have to be able to work independently.

These are some of the problems you might tackle on a day-to-day basis:

• Modifying our RL training stack to support end-to-end training with agent harnesses that implement subagents
• Figuring out how we can train agents to inject extremely realistic bugs in codebases, which enables us to build high quality bug-fixing tasks
• Designing experiments allowing us to measure code quality of agent-generated code beyond functional correctness

We care more about your problem solving abilities, creativity, and programming skills than formal research experience or ML fundamentals. In many cases, we have found that creative and high-agency software engineers are incredibly well suited to work on the problems we work on.

Interview Process

Our interview process is designed to be quick. We usually have 2-3 technical interviews before a final work trial in San Francisco or Bangalore.

About

Our early team has built coding agents and RL infrastructure at companies like Cursor and Prime Intellect, worked at companies like Jane Street, and founded companies that raised millions.

We are growing extremely fast and are backed by top-tier funds and angel investors from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta Superintelligence, Google Deepmind and Thinking Machines.

We work in-person from our office in North Beach, San Francisco and Bangalore.