RL Environment Engineer

Replay; New York (NY); On-site; USD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Base salary $220–320K

Equity

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Gym memberships

Desk allowance

Relocation bonus up to $15,000

Job summary

Replay is hiring an RL Environment Engineer to turn real enterprise data into realistic, verifiable training environments for frontier AI labs. You will own production-grade RL environments and work directly with researchers to understand capability gaps and design task suites that expose and train against them.

The role emphasizes high ownership, collaboration with frontier researchers, and shipping robust environments that scale with the business.

Qualifications

• 3–5+ years of ML/software engineering experience shipping production systems.
• Personally built production-grade RL environments used in real training or evaluation.
• Ability to turn researchers' goals into well-scoped, working systems.
• Understanding environment design tradeoffs: task spec, state design, determinism, solvability.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production-grade RL environments grounded in real enterprise workflows.
• Write reward functions and verifiers that score outcomes reliably and resist shortcuts.
• Create high-fidelity evaluation environments with seeded failure modes and reliable harnesses.
• Transform Replay's de-identified data into realistic state, tools, and context for agents; keep environments reproducible and safe.
• Collaborate with frontier lab researchers to identify capability gaps and design task suites to train against them.
• Measure task difficulty and solvability by testing frontier models against environments and tuning for usable training signals.
• Ship quickly and establish standards for how Replay builds tasks and environments.

Skills

ML/Software engineering

Production RL environments

Research collaboration

Ambiguity to working systems

Tools

RL Environments

Experimentation

Job description

About Replay

At its core, Replay was founded to help founders. We started by supporting startups through shutting down, but we've since expanded into unlocking a new revenue stream for all types of businesses.

In 2025, we earned a secret: the data every company generates on a daily basis (collaboration, communication, building) is some of the most valuable training data in the world. Public and synthetic can only get frontier models so far, so the next generation of model progression depends on real, proprietary data grounded in how actual businesses operate. We're a primary source of it, partnering directly with the frontier AI labs building what's next.

Why join Replay now:

• We've scaled from $0 to a multi-eight figures run rate in a matter of months

• We've raised from top-tier investors (Floodgate, Afore, Ludlow, Hustle Fund, etc.)

• We're small enough that you'll carry outsized responsibility and grow as fast as the company does

• You'll partner and build for the fastest and most important companies in the world

• You'll be a part of building a massive, category-defining business from the ground floor

The Role

Replay is hiring an RL Environment Engineer who has already built production-grade RL
environments and wants to point that craft at real enterprise data to shape our datasets into the training environments frontier AI labs use to make their models better. You'll turn real business workflows and real-world data into realistic, verifiable environments, with the tasks, tools, and graders to match, and work directly with lab researchers to understand which capabilities they want to improve. This is a hands‑on engineering role with a high degree of ownership.

What You'll Do

• Design and build production-grade RL environments grounded in real enterprise workflows, from task spec through to a stable, versioned release

• Write reward functions and programmatic verifiers that score outcomes reliably, and harden them against reward hacking and shortcut solutions

• Build high‑fidelity evaluation environments with seeded failure modes that expose subtle regressions, and reliable model and agent harnesses with bounded behaviour and explicit output verification

• Turn Replay's de‑identified data into realistic state, tools, files and context for an agent, and keep environments reproducible, observable and safe to roll out, with clear evidence of what changed between versions

• Work directly with frontier lab researchers to understand the capability gaps they want to close, and design task suites that expose and train against them

• Measure task difficulty and solvability by running frontier models against environments, then tune them until they give a usable training signal

• Ship quickly, and help set the standards and patterns for how Replay builds tasks and environments

Required aptitude

• 3-5+ years of ML / software engineering experience shipping production systems

• Personally built production‑grade RL environments that were used in real training or evaluation, not only prototypes or research demos

• Ability to turn ambiguous goals from researchers into well‑scoped, working systems

• A clear grasp of environment design tradeoffs: task specification, state and tool design, determinism, difficulty calibration and solvability

• Built evaluation or agentic harnesses, with comfort in evaluation rigor: precision, recall, calibration, imperfect labels and distribution shift

• A high‑ownership, action‑oriented mindset: you take problems from idea to shipped.

• Startup experience, a taste for broad ownership and the ability to do well when requirements are evolving

• Clear written and verbal communication with researchers, engineers, and non‑technical partners

Bonus

• Background at or working with a frontier AI lab, or in research‑adjacent engineering

• Experience in forward‑deployed or customer‑facing engineering roles

• Experience with sensitive enterprise data or other high‑trust production systems

• Previously a founder or early employee at a startup

Compensation & Benefits

• $220-320K base salary

• Meaningful equity

• 100% covered medical, dental, and vision

• Unlimited PTO

• Free gym + workout class memberships (via Wellhub)

• $500 desk allowance

• Up to $15,000 relocation bonus where applicable