Staff Research Engineer

turing; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 400,000; Full time

Job summary

Turing is seeking a Staff Research Engineer to own end-to-end data and RL environment creation for coding agents and software engineering. You will lead cross-functional teams and interface directly with researchers and engineers at frontier AI labs to meet their data needs.

You will influence product direction through hands-on technical leadership, manage pipelines, and scale data generation with automated tooling and internal systems.

Qualifications

• Post-training experience on SWE tasks or experience building coding agents.
• Engineering management experience including interviewing, hiring, and QA setup.
• Fluency in Python and proficiency in one or more major languages (C++, Java, Go, Rust, or JS).
• Operational leadership and cross-functional communication.

Responsibilities

• Lead creation of datasets, RL environments, and evals for coding agents and SWE for AI lab customers.
• Ensure all shipped work meets frontier standards for realism, correctness, diversity, and difficulty.
• Set up quality rubrics, automated validation, and human review processes for all data generation stages.
• Build and lead cross-functional teams of engineers, researchers, QAs, and data creators.

Skills

Engineering Management

Python

Coding languages

Data pipelines

Education

Background in Computer Science or ML

Tools

QA processes

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 atwww.turing.com

The Role

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:

• Environments for Software Engineering / coding agents
• MCP-based Environments for general function-calling agents across various enterprise and consumer applications

The Staff Research Engineer will own end-to-end the creation of datasets, RL environments, and evals for frontier AI labs in the domain of coding agents and software engineering.This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you influence revenue directly – you will be mapped to one or more AI labs and interface directly with researchers / engineers at those labs to understand their needs and build data offerings to address those needs. To achieve this, you will build and manage teams of software engineers, researchers, QAs, and contractors/data-annotators from Turing’s talent pool of 4M+ developers.

You’ll be responsible for delivering projects at frontier quality and scale—owning data quality, throughput, and timely delivery. You’ll define and manage data pipelines, validation workflows, and review processes to ensure datasets meet the highest standards for realism, correctness, and diversity. You’ll also develop automations, synthetic data generation systems, and internal tools to scale production efficiently.

In short, you’ll run your project like a startup within Turing, owning both the technical architecture and the operational execution required to produce best-in-class datasets/environments/evals to make the world’s best coding agents and models even better at real-world coding tasks across the software development lifecycle.

What you’ll do

1. End-to-End Ownership: Data Quality, Process Design, and Team Building

• Lead the creation of datasets, RL environments, and evals focused on Coding Agents / Software Engineering for one or more AI lab customers.
• Ensure that everything you ship to clients meets frontier standards for realism, correctness, diversity, and difficulty.
• Set up quality rubrics, automated validation scripts, and human review processes for every stage of data generation.
• Build and lead cross-functional teams of software engineers, researchers, QAs, and data creators drawn from Turing’s 4M+ developer network.
• Interview, onboard, train, and mentor team members to ensure consistent output quality and technical excellence.

2. Collaborate with Researchers at Frontier Labs

• Act as the primary technical point of contact for your customer projects, interfacing directly with researchers and engineers at frontier AI labs to understand their coding agent roadmap and model data needs, to gather feedback, and to co-define success criteria for your projects.
• Provide regular progress updates, surface insights from model evaluations, and incorporate client feedback to improve future iterations.

3. Drive Research, Sales Enablement, and Industry Thought Leadership

• Fine-tune models in-house on Turing-generated datasets or Turing-rl-environment generated trajectories to determine model improvement as a proof of data quality
• Proactively build benchmarks and run evals on frontier models and coding agents to identify strengths and weaknesses on SWE tasks, and leverage these insights to inform product roadmap
• Equip customer-facing teams with the Evaluation reports, sample datasets, and trainings to enable them to communicate your data offerings to customers most effectively
• Publish research papers and technical posts on Turing’s data products, innovations in our synthetic data generation / automation pipelines, evaluations of frontier agents and models, and Turing’s model fine-tuning results on our datasets.

4. Build Tools and Infrastructure

• Oversee development of internal tools that accelerate data generation and verification (e.g., automated data scraping pipelines, unit test generators, repo sandboxing).
• Design dashboards and APIs for customers to run model evals, view performance reports, and integrate Turing data directly into their post-training pipelines.

What we’re looking for

• Post-training experience on SWE tasks or experience building coding agents: We expect that you have a deep understanding of data ingredients and design principles that lead to measurable coding model improvements, either from fine-tuning models to improve SWE capabilities or building your own coding agents to improve upon SWE capabilities of the base model.
• Engineering Management experience: have led teams of engineers in the past, including interviewing/hiring them and setting up QA processes. Hands-on technical capability: Fluency in Python and proficiency in one or more major languages (C++, Java, Go, Rust, or JS).
• 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 post-training and RL environment design.
• Real impact (path to AGI): your datasets and environments will directly influence the trajectory toward Artificial General Intelligence and, ultimately, Superintelligence. Coding is the core reasoning substrate of intelligence—advancing models’ ability to understand, design, and write code is effectively advancing their capacity for logic, planning, and abstract thought.
• Real Impact (GDP): automating software engineering unlocks one of the largest productivity frontiers in history. The software engineering market represents trillions in global GDP, and every percentage gain in automation translates to profound efficiency and innovation benefits across all industries.
• Talent-dense team, where you'll find high autonomy, rapid iteration, and an exceptional 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.