Staff Software Engineer, Large-Scale RL Environments

Scale AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 252,000 - 315,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental coverage

Vision coverage

Retirement benefits

Learning stipend

Generous PTO

Job summary

Scale AI is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, RL Environments, to own the technical foundation for scalable RL environments. You will design sandboxed execution, packaging/versioning, and rollout orchestration while instrumenting real applications and building robust graders.

This role requires leadership across teams and hands-on implementation of critical components. Located in San Francisco, the role emphasizes production systems, high-throughput backends, and collaboration with researchers

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 how Scale builds, runs, verifies, and delivers RL environments at scale.
• Design the platform: sandboxed execution, environment packaging and versioning, rollout orchestration, trajectory capture, verifier frameworks, and authoring surfaces for engineers and domain experts.
• Work on environments by instrumenting real applications and building graders that hold up under adversarial optimization.
• Set technical direction across multiple teams and write the hard parts of the system.

Skills

Distributed systems

Python

Containerization

LLMs

Staff leadership

Communication

System design

Go/Rust

Tools

Docker

VMs

Kubernetes

gVisor/Firecracker

Job description

Scale AI is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, RL Environments, to own the technical foundation for scalable RL environments. You will design sandboxed execution, packaging/versioning, and rollout orchestration while instrumenting real applications and building robust graders.

This role requires leadership across teams and hands-on implementation of critical components. Located in San Francisco, the role emphasizes production systems, high-throughput backends, and collaboration with researchers