Research Scientist: RL Environments for Frontier AI

Traverse; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Traverse is a research data lab building reinforcement learning environments for frontier AI labs. As a Research Scientist, you will design and build RL environments that teach models to do work that has historically required years of human expertise.

You’ll work at the boundary of research and domain knowledge, turning that into training signals that actually work. We value rigorous reasoning about hard problems and fast learning.

Qualifications

• MS, PhD, or equivalent depth of experience in a rigorous field.
• Strong implementation skills and ability to run experiments quickly.
• Genuine curiosity about domains outside your own and how expertise works in them.
• You go deep on problems and don't stop at the obvious answer.

Responsibilities

• Research and develop novel approaches to reward modeling, environment design, and evaluation for non-deterministic domains.
• Collaborate with domain experts to understand mastery and translate it into training signals.
• Build and run experiments to validate environment improvements in model capabilities.
• Contribute to Traverse's research output and help establish methodology across new verticals.
• Work directly with partner labs to integrate environments into post-training pipelines.

Skills

Research

Experimentation

Problem solving

Deep reasoning

Education

MS/PhD or equivalent depth in a rigorous field

Tools

Python

Job description

Traverse is a research data lab building reinforcement learning environments for frontier AI labs. As a Research Scientist, you will design and build RL environments that teach models to do work that has historically required years of human expertise.

You’ll work at the boundary of research and domain knowledge, turning that into training signals that actually work. We value rigorous reasoning about hard problems and fast learning.