Staff Research Engineer

Turing; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Amazing work culture

Awesome colleagues

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Turing, based in San Francisco, seeks a Staff Research Engineer to own end-to-end RL environment projects for frontier AI labs and enterprises. You will lead multi-disciplinary teams, shape data pipelines, and drive revenue while delivering high-quality environments on time.

This hands-on leadership role requires strong Python/SQL skills, RL design experience, and the ability to manage complex, multi-stakeholder projects in a fast-paced setting. Equity accompanies competitive compensation.

Qualifications

• Familiarity with RL fine tuning, verifier/reward design, and/or environment design.
• Led teams of engineers, interviewed/hired, and set up QA processes.
• Ability to simulate data schema and API interfaces of applications.
• Willing to write code along with the team you’re managing; Python and SQL experience preferred.
• Proven ability to manage complex data pipelines, multi-stakeholder delivery, and high-stakes projects.
• Clear communication with researchers, subject-matter experts, and diverse teams.
• Background in CS, ML, or related technical field preferred.

Responsibilities

• Lead RL Environment projects end-to-end for one or more clients, ensuring alignment with specs.
• Ensure data quality of environments, trajectories, and reward scores meet frontier standards.
• Build and enable teams of engineers, domain experts, QAs, and data creators.
• Set processes, rubrics, automated validation scripts, and human-in-the-loop reviews.
• Own customer relationships and regular updates with AI labs, exploring expansion opportunities.
• Participate in client solutioning with sales to translate needs into environment goals.
• Demonstrate value via in-house RL fine-tuning experiments or eval reports.

Skills

RL & post-training experience

Engineering management

Systems thinking

Hands-on coding

Operational leadership

Cross-functional communicator

CS/ML background

Education

Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field

Tools

Python

SQL

Job description

About Turing

Based in San Francisco, California, Turing is the world’s leading research accelerator for frontier AI labs and a trusted partner for global enterprises looking to deploy advanced AI systems. Turing accelerates frontier research with high-quality data, specialized talent, and training pipelines that advance thinking, reasoning, coding, multimodality, and STEM. For enterprises, Turing builds proprietary intelligence systems that integrate AI into mission-critical workflows, unlock transformative outcomes, and drive lasting competitive advantage.

Recognized by Forbes, The Information, and Fast Company among the world’s top innovators, Turing’s leadership team includes AI technologists from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, McKinsey, Bain, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. Learn more at www.turing.com

What we do

Turing builds large-scale datasets and reinforcement learning (RL) environments that power post-training for the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises. We create RL environments to evaluate and improve our customers’ models on complex, long-range, multi-step workflows across high-GDP-value domains such as Finance, Sales, Retail, Developer Tools, Collaboration, Customer Experience.

The environments vary depending on the model capability being evaluated / improved, a few examples of environment types are listed here:

1. Environments for Software Engineering / coding agents
2. UI-Environments for Computer-Use/Browser-Use agents
3. MCP-based Environments for general function-calling agents across various enterprise and consumer applications.

The Role

We are looking for a Staff Research Engineer to own the end-to-end lifecycle of RL environment projects, spanning environment design, task generation, reward/verifier design, quality, and delivery to frontier AI labs and enterprise clients.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you influence revenue directly – you will be mapped to one or more AI labs and build RL environments specific to their needs. You will lead teams of engineers, subject matter experts (e.g. Finance expert, if you’re building an RL environment for investment banking workflows), researchers, and data ops teammates to achieve this.

What You’ll Do

• End-to-End Ownership: Lead RL Environment projects end-to-end for one or more clients, ensuring the environment you and your team create matches the client’s spec, surpasses quality expectations, and is delivered on time.
• Data Quality: Ensure the RL environments you produce, the data that goes into those environments, and the data generated from them (e.g. agent trajectories and reward scores) meet frontier standards for realism, difficulty, diversity.
• Team building and enablement : Work with your Ops counterparts to build the team of full-stack engineers, back-end engineers, domain experts, QAs, data creators, reviewers, and others you’ll need to deliver the environment on time. You’ll interview, hire, onboard, train, retain talent for your team
• Process Leadership: Set the process that each of the above team members follows to generate environment code, database schemas, seed data, tasks, and verifiers; set up quality rubrics, automated validation scripts, and human-in-the-loop review processes for every aspect of the environment and data for the environment.
• Customer Interaction: Own customer relationships for your RL Environment project(s), and act as the primary point of contact for leading AI labs, providing regular updates, asking for feedback, and identifying opportunities to grow project scope and revenue.
• Sales & Solutioning: participate in client solutioning conversations alongside our sales teammates; understand the needs of researchers at AI labs, translate those needs into environment goals
• Evals & Post-training: Demonstrate proof of value for your environments by running inhouse RL fine tuning experiments to measure model performance lifts on agent trajectories; or by producing eval reports of frontier models on your environment and tasks

Who We’re Looking For

• RL & Post-training experience: familiarity with RL fine tuning, verifier/reward design, and/or environment design
• Engineering Management experience : have led teams of engineers in the past, including interviewing/hiring them and setting up QA processes.
• Systems thinking + Database/API design: ability to ‘simulate’ the data schema and API interface of a consumer or business application
• Hands-on technical capability: willing to write code along with the team you’re managing; Python and SQL experience preferred
• Operational leadership: Proven ability to manage complex data pipelines, multi-stakeholder delivery, and concurrent high-stakes projects.
• Cross-functional communicator : ability to communicate clearly with researchers at frontier AI labs, subject matter experts for various domains, and diverse teams.
• Background in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related technical field preferred.

Why Turing

• Work directly with the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises at the cutting edge of RL environment design and post-training.
• Real impact: your environments will be used to evaluate and train frontier models on GDP-moving tasks across real-world domains
• Talent-dense team, where you’ll find high autonomy, rapid iteration, and rapid learning curve

Compensation

• $250,000 to $400,000 OTE + Equity

Values

• We are client first : We put our clients at the center of everything we do, because their success is the ultimate measure of our value.

• We work at Start-Up Speed: We move fast, stay agile and favor action because momentum is the foundation of perfection

• We are AI forward: We help our clients build the future of Al and implement it in our own roles and workflow to amplify productivity.

Advantages of joining Turing

• Amazing work culture (Super collaborative & supportive work environment; 5 days a week)

• Awesome colleagues (Surround yourself with top talent from Meta, Google, LinkedIn etc. as well as people with deep startup experience)

• Competitive compensation

Don’t meet every single requirement? Turing is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics. At Turing we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplaceand celebrate authenticity, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

For applicants from the European Union, please review Turing’s GDPR notice here.