Founding Research Engineer
San Francisco, CA·$200k – $350k + bonus + equity
Design RL environments and evaluations that lift frontier models in coding, autoresearch, and CAD.
About Steadyworks
Steadyworks is a data research lab powering the next generation of AI. We partner with frontier AI labs to build expert-grade datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and evaluation infrastructure that improve state-of-the-art models. Our team previously built frontier AI systems at Meta, Google Research, Autodesk, and other leading organizations.
What you'll work on
You'll work directly with the founders on cutting-edge RL environment engineering and research problems. Your work will ship to frontier labs, seed evaluation suites cited in model releases, or publish papers at top conferences.
- Building realistic RL environments for coding, ML research, CAD, and other frontier domains
- Designing challenging real-world tasks that measure and improve agent capabilities
- Developing scalable infrastructure for large-scale evaluation and data generation
- Building tooling that converts expert workflows into high-quality RL environments and training data
- Experimenting with new evaluation methodologies and agent workflows
- Collaborating closely with researchers at frontier AI labs
We're looking for someone who
- Has experience building RL environments, evaluation frameworks, AI infrastructure, or agent systems
- Thrives in ambiguous, fast-moving environments with significant ownership
- Reads research papers for fun and enjoys turning ideas into production-quality systems
Nice to have
- Experience with RL, LLM agents, post-training, or benchmark development
- Experience building developer tools or research infrastructure
- Contributions to open source or published research
- Background in machine learning systems, reinforcement learning, or distributed systems
Why Steadyworks
Our vision is to become the category-defining data research lab for frontier AI. As one of our first research hires, you'll have outsized ownership over both the technical direction of the company and the products used by frontier AI labs. We're especially excited to talk with former founders and builders who want to work on a hard technical problem inside a small team.
How to apply
Email careers@steadyworks.ai with anything that would help us understand your work.
Introduce yourself