Staff RL Environments Engineer - Build Scalable AI Worlds

Scale AI, Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 252,000 - 315,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Learning stipend

PTO

Job summary

Scale AI is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, RL Environments, to own the technical foundation for scalable RL environments. You’ll build containerized worlds, verifiers, and the tooling to run thousands of environments with reliable reward signals.

You’ll design sandboxed execution, environment packaging, and rollout orchestration, while also diving deep into environment implementations, creating task suites, and building graders that resist adversarial optimization.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with strong fundamentals in distributed systems, system design, data structures, and algorithms.
• Strong Python skills and a track record of shipping production software; comfort in at least one other part of the stack (TypeScript/React, Go, Rust, or similar).
• Deep experience with containerization and sandboxed execution, including Docker, VMs, gVisor/Firecracker, Kubernetes, or equivalent.
• Experience building or operating high-throughput backend systems: orchestration, job scheduling, queuing, and large-scale data pipelines.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs including agent loops, tool calling, MCP, or eval harnesses, and enough intuition about model behavior to reason about what a training signal actually teaches.
• Demonstrated ability to own ambiguous, undefined problems end to end and drive them to a shipped system.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to align engineers, researchers, and non-engineering partners on a technical direction.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical foundation for RL environments at scale, including how Scale builds, runs, verifies, and delivers environments.
• Design sandboxed execution, environment packaging and versioning, rollout orchestration, trajectory capture, verifier frameworks, and authoring surfaces for engineers and domain experts.
• Write the hard parts and set technical direction across multiple teams, while maintaining hands-on involvement.

Skills

Distributed systems

Python

TypeScript/React

Containers

LLMs

Ownership

Technical leadership

Tools

Docker

VMs

Kubernetes

gVisor/Firecracker

Job description

Scale AI is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, RL Environments, to own the technical foundation for scalable RL environments. You’ll build containerized worlds, verifiers, and the tooling to run thousands of environments with reliable reward signals.

You’ll design sandboxed execution, environment packaging, and rollout orchestration, while also diving deep into environment implementations, creating task suites, and building graders that resist adversarial optimization.