Research Scientist – Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Percepta; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Percepta is seeking a Research Scientist - Reinforcement Learning to work at the intersection of RL research and real-world deployment. You will drive decision-making capabilities for critical industries and collaborate with Embedded Product Managers and engineers to ensure transformative outcomes across our Mosaic platform.

You will advance RL methods, maintain experiments, and communicate results to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, with a strong emphasis on ownership and impact.

Qualifications

• MS/PhD in CS, ML, or related field or equivalent experience.
• Track record of effective RL work.
• Motivated by impact in critical industries (healthcare, supply chains, energy, finance).
• Understand how to perform rigorous RL experimentation.
• Enjoy extreme ownership.

Responsibilities

• Identify real-world challenges tractable for RL-guided decision making.
• Develop RL methods for planning, decision-making, or optimization.
• Develop and maintain experimental infrastructure (simulation environments, data pipelines, training/evaluation).
• Conduct in-the-wild evaluations at scale that drive value.
• Partner with applied AI engineers to transition research into Mosaic features.
• Communicate research outcomes to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Skills

RL research

Python

Distributed systems

Education

MS/PhD in CS/ML

Tools

Ray

Kubernetes

AWS

vLLM/SGLang

Job description

Who We Are

Percepta’s mission is to transform critical institutions with applied AI. We care that industries that power the world (e.g. healthcare, manufacturing, energy) benefit from frontier technology.

To make that happen, we embed with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation. We bring together:

• Forward-deployed expertise in engineering, product, and research

• Mosaic, our in-house toolkit for rapidly deploying agentic workflows

• Strategic partnerships with Anthropic, McKinsey, AWS, companies within the General Catalyst portfolio, and more

Our team is a quickly growing group of Applied AI Engineers, Embedded Product Managers and Researchers motivated by diffusing the promise of AI into improvements we can feel in our day to day lives.

Percepta is a direct partnership with General Catalyst, a global transformation and investment company.

About the role

As a Research Scientist - Reinforcement Learning at Percepta, you will work at the intersection of RL research and real-world deployment. You will advance the frontier of capabilities through research on decision-making for critical industries. You will collaborate closely with our Embedded Product Managers (EPMs) and engineers to ensure that our solutions transform how companies operate.

Responsibilities

• Identifying which real-world challenges are tractable for RL-guided decision making.

• Develop RL methods to perform complex tasks in domains like planning, decision-making, or optimization.

• Develop and maintain the experimental infrastructure that powers our research, from simulation environments and data pipelines to training and evaluation frameworks.

• Conduct in-the-wild evaluations at scale that drive millions of dollars in value.

• Partner with our applied AI engineers to transition successful research ideas into robust features of our Mosaic platform.

• Communicate research outcomes to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, making sure everyone understands the “so what” of research and how to apply it.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have an MS/PhD in Computer Science, ML, or related field, or equivalent experience.

• Have a track record of effective RL work.

• Are motivated by impact in critical industries including healthcare, supply chains, energy, and finance.

• Understand how to perform rigorous RL experimentation.

• Enjoy extreme ownership.

• Believe that AI can drive transformative change in critical industries.

The following list can be a sign that you might be a good technical fit:

• High performance, large scale distributed systems.

• Large scale LLM training or RL training.

• Possess strong programming skills, especially in Python.

• Implementing LLM post-training algorithms.

• Experience with vLLM/SGLang, Ray, Kubernetes (or AWS EKS).

• Experience with distributed checkpointing, multi-node, multi-gpu training, custom KV-caching.

• Experience with asynchronous training and inference, either with VeRL, ROLL, SkyRL, AReal, or with RL libraries like CleanRL.

We’re working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won’t be easy, but it will likely be the most fulfilling work of your career. If this excites you, let’s chat, even if you don’t meet all of the qualifications above.

Our Values

Dream bigger: We have the unique privilege of taking on the most ambitious problems and we should chase them with optimism, responsibility, and genuine belief that we can make it happen. We have to embrace the hard things when no one else will.

Heart in the game: What we’re doing matters and we have to give a shit. Internally, that means fixing badness when you find it. Externally, it means honoring the trust our customers place in us with their most important problems. This isn’t a 9-5, nor is it a job we’re ever going to monitor your hours. We promise to put work in front of you that matters and in return, we ask you to promise to care.

Win for the customer: Everyone is an engineer and the job of an engineer is to deliver outcomes, not outputs. Everything we do—the products we build, the partnerships we launch, the strategy we set—exists to make our customers successful. Delivery is the strategy.

Make the call: Organizations are only as strong as the pace at which they make decisions. Everyone at Percepta should feel empowered to commit and shape the ambiguity in front of them. But “make the call” cuts both ways: make the decision and make the phone call. High-agency decision-making only works with high-bandwidth communication and we commit to never operate in silos.

Intensity with kindness: We believe in excellence in execution, candor in feedback, ruthlessness in prioritization, and survivalist urgency. We also believe you don’t need to be an asshole to deliver on any of this. The trust built through shared kindness and vulnerability is what makes the intensity sustainable.