Research Engineer - Data and Evaluation

Prime Intellect
San Francisco, CA
Remote

Who this role is best for

A natural match if you have experience building evaluation systems and working with language models in a remote or hybrid setting.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with experience in building evaluation systems and debugging model behaviors
    — “hands-on experience building technical evaluations or agent environments”
  • Individuals who have worked on large-scale data pipelines and model training frameworks
    — “experience building data pipelines, evaluation systems, or ML workflows used by others”
  • People with a background in reward design and diagnosing model failure modes
    — “diagnosing reward exploitation”

Things to consider

  • The role demands a high level of technical ownership and validation of complex systems
    — “A record of owning technical projects through experimentation, implementation, and validation”
  • Remote work is an option, but in-person collaboration in San Francisco is also supported
    — “Flexible work arrangements, with the option to work remotely or in-person at our offices in San Francisco”

How to stand out

  • Highlight your experience in debugging model traces and scoring logic in your resume and interviews
    — “inspect model traces and debug harness and scoring code”
  • Showcase your ability to design and implement complex evaluation systems and environments
    — “Design and build challenging evaluations for coding and long-horizon agents”
  • Emphasize your hands-on work with language models and how you've influenced their behavior through training data
    — “understanding of how training data and evaluation choices affect model behavior”
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · Team

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

What success looks like

  • challenging evaluations for coding and long-horizon agents
  • executable environments with realistic task setup
  • scoring logic and verifiers
  • tracing failures through model outputs
  • RL data pipelines
Typical background
strong software engineering skillsexperience with language modelsability to inspect complex data

Skills & requirements

Required

Software EngineeringData PipelinesEvaluation SystemsML WorkflowsLanguage ModelsAgentsTraining DataEvaluation ChoicesModel OutputsFailure ModesTestable MeasurementsTechnical ProjectsCollaboration With Researchers And Engineers

Preferred

Large-scale Synthetic Data GenerationDataset CurationDistributed ProcessingEvaluation MethodologyExecutable Coding TasksAgent EnvironmentsVerifiersReward Design

Stack & domain

Python

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

Build the tasks and environments that train Prime Intellect’s models through RL, and the evaluations that show what they can actually do. You’ll work directly with researchers to investigate model failures, from how a task is implemented to how success is scored.

RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Design and build challenging evaluations for coding and long-horizon agents.
  • Build executable environments in Verifiers, with realistic task setup and clear success criteria.
  • Develop and test scoring logic and verifiers, investigating reward hacks and misleading measures of progress.
  • Trace failures through model outputs and harness code to distinguish model limitations from problems in the environment or scoring.
  • Build and scale RL data pipelines that generate and curate challenging coding and agentic tasks.
  • Work with RL researchers to test whether changes to tasks and training data improve performance on held-out tasks.

REQUIREMENTS

  • Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience building data pipelines, evaluation systems, or ML workflows used by others.
  • Hands-on experience working with language models or agents, with an understanding of how training data and evaluation choices affect model behavior.
  • Ability to inspect complex data and model outputs, identify failure modes, and turn an ambiguous quality question into a testable measurement.
  • A record of owning technical projects through experimentation, implementation, and validation, while collaborating closely with researchers and engineers.
  • Hands-on experience building technical evaluations or agent environments, with the engineering depth to inspect model traces and debug harness and scoring code.

Relevant experience may include:

  • Large-scale synthetic data generation, dataset curation, or distributed processing for model training.
  • Evaluation methodology, executable coding tasks, agent environments, verifiers, or reward design.
  • Experiment analysis, statistical testing, contamination detection, and reproducible research tooling.

Nice to have

  • Experience with RL or post-training data, including task difficulty selection and analysis of rollout or reward distributions.
  • Contributions to Verifiers, Prime-RL, or comparable environment and evaluation frameworks.
  • Work on model-based grading, long-horizon coding agents, or diagnosing reward exploitation.

We welcome depth in data generation, environments and rewards, or evaluation systems. You don’t need to have worked across every area.

BENEFITS AND PERKS

  • Cash Compensation Range of $150-350k, including equity incentives, aligning your success with the growth and impact of Prime Intellect.
  • Flexible work arrangements, with the option to work remotely or in-person at our offices in San Francisco.
  • Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance for international candidates.
  • Quarterly team off-sites, hackathons, conferences and learning opportunities.
  • Opportunity to work with a talented, hard-working and mission-driven team, united by a shared passion for leveraging technology to accelerate science and AI.

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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