Senior Researcher: Agentic AI, RL & Simulation

Patronus AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Patronus AI is a frontier lab accelerating progress toward human-aligned AGI, focused on simulation research and infrastructure. We are seeking a Researcher to own foundational research at the intersection of reinforcement learning, simulations, and scalable oversight, translating questions into rigorous experiments, benchmarks, and production-ready systems.

This highly autonomous role emphasizes designing environments, evaluating frontier agents, and publishing or open-sourcing work.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, ML, Statistics, Mathematics, or related field.
• Experience conducting independent RL/NLP or agentic research.
• Ability to translate open-ended problems into rigorous experiments.

Responsibilities

• Own ambitious research projects end-to-end from problem formulation to production impact.
• Advance research in agent simulation, RL, and scalable oversight.
• Design state-of-the-art simulation environments for frontier agents.
• Train models and run ablations with open-source models and distillation techniques.
• Publish findings and contribute to research direction.

Skills

Python programming

Experiment design

Reinforcement learning

Communication

Research collaboration

Education

MS or PhD in CS/ML/Math

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Patronus AI is a frontier lab accelerating progress toward human-aligned AGI, focused on simulation research and infrastructure. We are seeking a Researcher to own foundational research at the intersection of reinforcement learning, simulations, and scalable oversight, translating questions into rigorous experiments, benchmarks, and production-ready systems.

This highly autonomous role emphasizes designing environments, evaluating frontier agents, and publishing or open-sourcing work.