Senior Staff Research Scientist, Reinforcement Learning

Centific; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Centific Global Solutions, Inc. is seeking a Senior Staff Research Scientist in Agentic AI & Reinforcement Learning to lead cutting-edge AI initiatives. This role emphasizes significant technical influence, mentoring, and design responsibilities in building governed RL environments and LLM post-training pipelines.

The ideal candidate will excel at both individual contributions and leading research teams, contributing to critical enterprise AI products while ensuring technical excellence and innovation.

Qualifications

• Highly technical role focused on designing governed RL environments.
• Experience with LLM post-training pipelines and agentic reasoning systems.
• Ability to mentor and lead small teams of researchers and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design and build governed reinforcement learning environments.
• Translate complex requirements into scalable systems.
• Drive technical outcomes and mentor team members.

Job description

## Senior Staff Research Scientist, Agentic AI & RLApplylocations: East Palo Alto, CAtime type: Full timeposted on: Posted Todayjob requisition id: JR107333**About Centific**Centific is a frontier AI data foundry that curates diverse, high-quality data, using our purpose-built technology platforms to empower the Magnificent Seven and our enterprise clients with safe, scalable AI deployment. Our team includes more than 150 PhDs and data scientists, along with more than 4,000 AI practitioners and engineers. We harness the power of an integrated solution ecosystem—comprising industry-leading partnerships and 1.8 million vertical domain experts in more than 230 markets—to create contextual, multilingual, pre-trained datasets; fine-tuned, industry-specific LLMs; and RAG pipelines supported by vector databases. Our zero-distance innovationTM solutions for GenAI can reduce GenAI costs by up to 80% and bring solutions to market 50% faster.Our mission is to bridge the gap between AI creators and industry leaders by bringing best practices in GenAI to unicorn innovators and enterprise customers. We aim to help these organizations unlock significant business value by deploying GenAI at scale, helping to ensure they stay at the forefront of technological advancement and maintain a competitive edge in their respective markets.**About Job**Senior Staff Research Scientist, Agentic AI & RLRole OverviewWe are hiring a **Staff Research Scientist, Agentic AI & Reinforcement Learning** — a dual-track role designed for exceptional technical leaders who want to drive deep hands-on impact while growing their influence across research, engineering, and product. Whether your strength is individual technical contribution at the highest level or leading a small, elite team of researchers and engineers, this role is built for you.You will be a key architect of Centific’s Agentic AI and RL platform — designing and building governed RL environments, LLM post-training pipelines, and agentic reasoning systems that power enterprise AI products. You will bridge cutting-edge research and production-grade delivery, setting the technical bar for the team and translating complex requirements into systems that work at scale.This is a **high-ownership, high-autonomy role** where you will define how things are built, mentor those around you, and be accountable for technical outcomes — not just execution. The ideal candidate is deeply technical, entrepreneurially minded, and equally comfortable writing production code, reviewing research, and shaping technical direction with stakeholders.**IC Track (Senior Staff Engineer):** You are the deepest technical expert on the team. You own architecture, set implementation standards, and drive breakthrough technical outcomes personally and through influence. You may informally mentor 1–2 engineers but your primary leverage is your own technical output and cross-team technical leadership.**Manager Track (Senior Manager):** You lead a focused team of 4–8 Research Scientists and RL Engineers. You remain deeply technical — reviewing code, shaping architecture, and setting research direction — while also hiring, mentoring, and managing the team’s delivery and growth. You are accountable for both people and technical outcomes.### ### Centific is an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, familial status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.