Staff Research Engineer, Frontier AI & Simulation

Collinear AI; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Collinear AI is seeking a Member of Technical Staff (MTS - Research) to help build the data engine for frontier AI. You will bridge frontier research and production engineering, developing high-fidelity environments and evaluation stacks used by leading labs to stress-test agents.

In this role you will iterate on RL approaches, create scalable infrastructure, and work daily with the founders and research staff to push AI reliability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in CS, Math, Physics, or equivalent, or demonstrated open-source contributions or industry experience.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with Python CLI-first development.
• ML foundation models knowledge: construction, evaluation, and optimization.
• Experience in research with reproducible data-driven results.

Responsibilities

• Build agentic environments: design next-gen simulators for agent learning in uncertain contexts.
• Programmatic verification: develop policy-aware judges and evaluations beyond benchmarks.
• Close the loop: run post-training experiments (CPT, SFT, RL) for frontier performance on open-source models.
• Rapid iteration: debug and iterate across the ML stack from infrastructure to model behavior, CLI-first tools.
• Collaborate: work daily with founders and researchers to shape the roadmap and push state-of-the-art in AI reliability.

Skills

Tech foundation

Engineering rigor

ML fluency

Empirical mindset

Research taste

Impact-driven

Domain expertise

Proven track record

RLHF/RLAIF

Post-training experience

PythonCLI

Education

Technical degree or proven equivalent

Tools

Python

Job description

Collinear AI is seeking a Member of Technical Staff (MTS - Research) to help build the data engine for frontier AI. You will bridge frontier research and production engineering, developing high-fidelity environments and evaluation stacks used by leading labs to stress-test agents.

In this role you will iterate on RL approaches, create scalable infrastructure, and work daily with the founders and research staff to push AI reliability.