Senior Research Scientist - Post-training / RL

Epsilon Health; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Epsilon Health is transforming medical imaging with frontier AI. We seek a Research Scientist to own post-training, reward modeling, and reinforcement learning for radiology reports. You will work on multimodal models with clinical rigor, leveraging large-scale medical imaging data and cutting-edge RL techniques.

Join a team advancing state-of-the-art grounded report generation and inference-time strategies, while publishing and shaping deployment practices in healthcare AI.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of academia/industry experience in reinforcement learning, post-training, or multimodal machine learning
• Deep expertise in post-training large language or vision-language models (e.g., Qwen-VL, InternVL, LLaVA, or similar architectures)
• Strong foundation in modern post-training and reinforcement learning techniques including GRPO/DAPO/GSPO/CISPO with multi-reward objectives
• Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, including noisy, sparse, or learned reward signals
• Reward model training: outcome and process supervision
• Preference optimization methods (DPO, IPO, ORPO, KTO) and RLHF
• Inference-time compute scaling: best-of-N sampling and verifier-guided decoding
• Practical experience diagnosing reward hacking and over-optimization
• Track record of implementing complex models from research to production
• Proficiency in PyTorch or JAX, with experience training large models on multi-GPU
• Experience with RL infrastructure (rollout generation) and frameworks such as verl, TRL, or OpenRLHF
• Autoregressive language modeling and instruction tuning
• Strong software engineering and production-quality coding

Responsibilities

• Design reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for report generation in radiology workflows
• Extend RL to unverifiable/noisy objectives using learned reward models and radiologist feedback (RLHF)
• Run GRPO-family algorithms with multi-reward objectives and diagnose reward hacking
• Train explicit reward models with multimodal conditioning on images
• Train chain-of-thought reasoning over image regions with grounding
• Develop multimodal tool use with credit assignment across trajectories
• Create inference-time methods like best-of-N and grounding-aware decoding
• Tune output to institutional reporting conventions
• Stay current with reinforcement learning, reward modeling, and multimodal post-training
• Publish findings and establish best practices for post-training medical VLMs

Skills

reinforcement learning

post-training

multimodal ML

vision-language models

PyTorch

JAX

distributed systems

reinforcement learning infrastructure

Tools

vLLM

SGLang

TRL

OpenRLHF

GPUs

Job description

About Us

Epsilon Health is transforming medical imaging and diagnostics by bringing frontier AI into clinical practice. We're tackling some of healthcare's most critical challenges, building technology that directly improves patient outcomes.

This year, we've served over 300,000 patients and now serve 3,000+ daily, working with some of the largest medical institutions in the U.S. By year-end we will interpret 1% of all daily U.S. X-rays.

Our research team brings experience from DeepMind and Meta, powered by one of the industry's most comprehensive proprietary medical imaging datasets, continuously enriched by real-world clinical data. Together, we're building a future where frontier AI helps save millions of lives today, not tomorrow.

Recently out of stealth, we're proudly backed by Jack Altman, Uncork Capital, Renegade Partners, and AlleyCorp, one of NYC's most active healthcare venture firms.

Role Overview

We're seeking a Research Scientist with deep expertise in post-training and reinforcement learning to join our ML Research team. You'll be at the forefront of developing and deploying state-of-the-art multimodal models for clinical use in radiology settings. This role owns every stage after pretraining: supervised fine-tuning, reward modeling, reinforcement learning against verifiable and learned reward signals, reasoning and tool-use training, and inference-time strategy. You'll work with one of the largest and most diverse medical imaging datasets in the industry, advancing the state-of-the-art in grounded report generation, reward design, and inference-time reasoning while maintaining the clinical rigor required for healthcare deployment.

Key Responsibilities

• Design reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for report generation, including clinical label and entity-relation matching, grounding IoU, measurement accuracy, and reporting schema compliance.

• Extend reinforcement learning to unverifiable and noisy objectives such as report quality and clinical usefulness, using learned reward models and radiologist feedback pipelines (RLHF) built on expert preferences and report edits.

• Run GRPO-family algorithms with complex multi-reward objectives, tuning reward composition and diagnosing reward hacking, entropy collapse, and diversity loss.

• Train explicit reward models, including multimodal reward models conditioned on the image, with both outcome and process supervision.

• Train chain-of-thought reasoning over image regions, including evidence localization and verification loops that keep reasoning grounded in the image rather than in language priors.

• Train multimodal tool use — windowing, zoom and crop, detector and segmentation calls, prior study retrieval — with credit assignment across multi-turn trajectories.

• Develop inference-time methods including best-of-N sampling against reward models and grounding-aware decoding, and distill the resulting gains back into the policy.

• Tune output stylization to institutional reporting conventions, keeping style rewards separated from clinical content rewards.

• Stay current with cutting-edge research in reinforcement learning, reward modeling, and multimodal post-training.

• Drive research and technical excellence through conference publications and technical blog posts, establishing best practices for post‑training medical VLMs at scale.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of academia/industry experience in reinforcement learning, post‑training, or multimodal machine learning

• Deep expertise in post‑training large language or vision‑language models (e.g., Qwen‑VL, InternVL, LLaVA, or similar architectures)

• Strong foundation in modern post‑training and reinforcement learning techniques including:

  • Group‑relative policy optimization and its successors (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO, CISPO) with multi‑reward objectives

  • Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, and with noisy, sparse, or learned reward signals

  • Reward model training: pairwise and generative reward models, outcome and process supervision

  • Preference optimization methods (DPO, IPO, ORPO, KTO) and RLHF

  • Inference‑time compute scaling, including best‑of‑N sampling and verifier‑guided decoding

• Practical experience diagnosing and mitigating reward hacking and reward over‑optimization

• Track record of implementing complex models from research papers and adapting them to new domains

• Proficiency in PyTorch or JAX, with experience training large models on multi‑GPU/distributed systems

• Experience with reinforcement learning infrastructure at scale, including rollout generation (vLLM, SGLang) and frameworks such as verl, TRL, or OpenRLHF

• Experience with autoregressive language modeling and instruction tuning

• Strong software engineering skills and ability to write production‑quality code

Preferred Qualifications

• Publications at top‑tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL, EMNLP, MICCAI)

• Hands‑on experience with medical imaging applications, particularly radiology report generation

• Experience with agentic or multi‑turn reinforcement learning, including credit assignment over tool‑use trajectories

• Experience with grounded generation tasks (visual grounding, referring expression comprehension)

• Knowledge of evaluation methodologies for long‑form generation, including factuality assessment and hallucination detection

• Experience mitigating catastrophic forgetting of supervised capabilities during reinforcement learning

• Familiarity with clinical NLP and medical knowledge representation

• Experience with model interpretability, explainability, and uncertainty quantification in safety‑critical applications