Applied Research - Computer Use

Prime Intellect
San Francisco +2 more
Remote

Who this role is best for

A natural match if you have experience in multimodal agents and long-horizon evaluation systems.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with experience in building long-horizon agent evaluation systems and multimodal environments
    — “Build long-horizon computer-use environments from real workflows while preventing shortcuts”
  • Individuals who can manage ambiguous problems and maintain stakeholder alignment during resolution
    — “Comfort owning ambiguous problems and keeping partners and teammates current as you resolve them”
  • Researchers with a track record of creating open-source systems or benchmarks
    — “We value publications, open-source systems, benchmarks, and shipped products as evidence of exceptional work”

Things to consider

  • The role requires a strong ability to debug and build complex model-training and evaluation loops
    — “Hands-on experience building and debugging model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation”
  • The position demands ownership of research outcomes and clear attribution of failures or successes
    — “Strong experimental judgment: meaningful baselines, careful trace inspection, clear failure attribution”

How to stand out

  • Highlight your ability to build reusable open-source systems from complex agent workflows
    — “The reusable parts become shared research, open-source systems, and product capabilities”
  • Emphasize your experience in handling interface changes and agent recovery in ambiguous states
    — “Train agents to recover from interface changes, partial failures, and ambiguous intermediate states”
  • Showcase your ability to design evaluations that distinguish genuine completion from superficial behavior
    — “Develop evaluations that distinguish genuine completion from plausible-looking behavior”
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · MediumAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · Company

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • built post-training systems
  • evaluated agent workflows
  • deployed reliable solutions
Typical background
AI researchengineering

Skills & requirements

Required

Applied-researchMultimodal-environmentsAgent-workflowsPost-training-evaluation

Preferred

SuperintelligenceFrontier-ai

Stack & domain

PythonAILeadershipCommunicationInfrastructureResearch

About the role

Original posting from Prime Intellect via Ashby

OWN YOUR INTELLIGENCE

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team.

Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own.

Prime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators — including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more. We are looking for people who want to build at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a category that does not fully exist yet.

ROLE IMPACT

Computer-use agents must understand changing interfaces, maintain intent over long workflows, recover from mistakes, manage permissions and side effects, and know when an outcome is actually complete. You will build post-training and evaluation systems for multimodal agents operating browsers, desktops, and cross-application workflows. The work is grounded in an active external program. The research challenge is turning real workflows and traces into environments, rewards, and experiments that produce reliable improvement.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Applied Research at Prime

We turn a workflow into tasks, environments, evaluations, and reward signals, run post-training experiments against real baselines, and deploy what works. When a result looks good, we find out whether the gain came from the model or from the data, harness, inference, or infrastructure. The reusable parts become shared research, open-source systems, and product capabilities.

Every Applied Research role is externally facing. Most researchers work directly with customers, users, or research partners while maintaining a substantive research agenda.

Representative early problems

  • Build long-horizon computer-use environments from real workflows while preventing shortcuts, leakage, and unsafe side effects.
  • Train agents to recover from interface changes, partial failures, and ambiguous intermediate states instead of restarting or silently drifting.
  • Develop evaluations that distinguish genuine completion from plausible-looking behavior, including correctness, efficiency, permissions, and appropriate escalation.

What you will own

  • Multimodal environments built from partner workflows, demonstrations, tools, interface state, and outcome criteria.
  • Browser, desktop, and cross-application agents with reliable sandbox and boundary enforcement.
  • Training and evaluation from demonstrations, interventions, production failures, synthetic tasks, and verifiable outcomes.
  • Experiments on recovery and generalization across applications, layouts, permissions, and deployment contexts.

REQUIREMENTS

  • Relevant experience: multimodal agents, computer use, browser or desktop automation, RL, imitation learning, HCI, embodied agents, or long-horizon agent evaluation.
  • Hands-on experience building and debugging model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation, or closely adjacent experimental loops.
  • Strong experimental judgment: meaningful baselines, careful trace inspection, clear failure attribution, and a willingness to change direction when the evidence changes.
  • Strong Python and the ability to build artifacts that other researchers and engineers can run, inspect, and extend.
  • Comfort owning ambiguous problems and keeping partners and teammates current as you resolve them.

Evidence of exceptional work

We value publications, open-source systems, benchmarks, and shipped products as evidence of exceptional work. Show us something difficult you built, what failed, and how the evidence changed your approach.

BENEFITS AND PERKS

  • Cash Compensation Range of $150-300k + equity incentives
  • Flexible Work (San Francisco, New York, London, or remote)
  • Visa Sponsorship & relocation support
  • Professional Development budget
  • Team Off-sites & conference attendance

If you're excited about the opportunity to build the foundation for the future of decentralized AI and create a platform that empowers developers and researchers to push the boundaries of what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.

Source: Prime Intellect careers (Ashby)

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