Senior Reinforcement Learning Research Engineer – Remote

Placements24; East London; Hybrid; ZAR 900,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Health insurance

Generous paid time off

Conference attendance

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Senior AI Research Engineer specializing in Reinforcement Learning to join a distributed, remote-first team based in East London, Eastern Cape, ZA. You will advance state-of-the-art RL algorithms and build scalable simulation environments.

You’ll collaborate with world-class researchers, publish findings, mentor junior staff, and contribute to practical, impactful AI solutions across domains. This role offers flexible remote work and competitive compensation.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s in CS/AI/Robotics with RL focus.
• Proven RL research record with publications.
• Strong Python and DL framework skills.
• Experience with RL libraries such as Stable Baselines3, RLlib, OpenAI Gym.
• Excellent analytical, communication, and remote collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead RL research and algorithm development.
• Design and evaluate RL agents for control and optimization.
• Develop high-performance RL simulation environments.
• Collaborate with teams to apply RL to business challenges.
• Publish findings in top conferences and journals.
• Mentor junior researchers and engineers.
• Ensure reproducibility and documentation of experiments.

Skills

Reinforcement Learning

Python

Research Publications

Remote work

Communication

Education

PhD or Master’s in CS/AI/Robotics

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Stable Baselines3

RLlib

OpenAI Gym

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Senior AI Research Engineer specializing in Reinforcement Learning to join a distributed, remote-first team based in East London, Eastern Cape, ZA. You will advance state-of-the-art RL algorithms and build scalable simulation environments.

You’ll collaborate with world-class researchers, publish findings, mentor junior staff, and contribute to practical, impactful AI solutions across domains. This role offers flexible remote work and competitive compensation.