Applied Research - Evals & Data at Prime Intellect

**Who this is for** This role is for a machine learning engineer interested in the intersection of frontier AI research, applied data, and robust infrastructure

Work type: hybrid

Location: San Francisco

Salary: $150,000 – $300,000/yr

Type: Full-time

Summary

**Who this is for** This role is for a machine learning engineer interested in the intersection of frontier AI research, applied data, and robust infrastructure. You'll work directly with customers to advance AI agent capabilities and build the systems that enable them to operate reliably at scale. **Key highlights** You will be instrumental in designing and implementing next-generation AI agents, building scalable distributed systems for their operation, and bridging the gap between customer needs and research priorities. This customer-facing position involves prototyping in the field and influencing product direction through real-world data. **You might be a good fit if you...** - Have a strong background in machine learning engineering with experience in post-training or RL. - Are skilled in developing distributed systems, evaluation pipelines, and data capture workflows. - Can translate customer insights into technical requirements and collaborate with research teams. - Enjoy rapid prototyping and iterating on AI agents and their supporting infrastructure.

Job Description

Be Your Own Lab
Prime Intellect builds the infrastructure that frontier AI labs build internally, and makes it available to everyone. Our platform, Lab, unifies environments, evaluations, sandboxes, and high-performance training into a single full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale, from RL and SFT to tool use, agent workflows, and deployment. We validate everything by using it ourselves, training open state-of-the-art models on the same stack we put in your hands. We're looking for people who want to build at the intersection of frontier research and real infrastructure.

We recently raised $15mm in funding (total of $20mm raised) led by Founders Fund, with participation from Menlo Ventures and prominent angels including Andrej Karpathy (Eureka AI, Tesla, OpenAI), Tri Dao (Chief Scientific Officer of Together AI), Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis), Clem Delangue (Huggingface), Emad Mostaque (Stability AI) and many others.

Role Impact

This is a customer facing role at the intersection of cutting-edge RL/post-training methods, applied data, and agent systems. You’ll have a direct impact on shaping how advanced models are aligned, evaluated, deployed, and used in the real world by:

• Advancing Agent Capabilities: Designing and iterating on next-generation AI agents that tackle real workloads—workflow automation, reasoning-intensive tasks, and decision-making at scale. Working with applied data from real deployments to continuously refine policies, improve reasoning, and enhance reliability and safety.

• Building Robust Infrastructure: Developing the distributed systems, evaluation pipelines, and coordination frameworks that enable these agents to operate reliably, efficiently, and at massive scale. Building data capture, processing, and versioning workflows for feedback, model traces, and reward signals.

• Bridge Between Customers & Research: Translating customer needs and insights from applied data into clear technical requirements that guide product and research priorities. Collaborating closely with RL and eval teams to ensure real-world signals inform model alignment and reward shaping.

• Prototype in the Field: Rapidly designing and deploying agents, evals, and harnesses alongside customers to validate solutions. Using applied evaluation data to iterate on model performance and discover new capabilities.

• Work side-by-side with customers to deeply understand workflows, data sources, and bottlenecks.

• Prototype agents, data pipelines, and eval harnesses tailored to real use cases, then hand off hardened systems to core teams.

• Translate customer insights and evaluation results into roadmap and research direction.

• Design and implement novel RL and post-training methods (RLHF, RLVR, GRPO, etc.) to align large models with domain-specific tasks.

• Build evaluation harnesses and verifiers to measure reasoning, robustness, and agentic behavior in real-world workflows.

• Integrate applied data collection and analytics into the post-training process to surface regressions, emergent skills, and alignment opportunities.

• Prototype multi-agent and memory-augmented systems to expand capabilities for customer-facing solutions.

• Rapidly prototype and iterate on AI agents for automation, workflow orchestration, and decision-making.

• Extend and integrate with agent frameworks to support evolving feature requests and performance requirements.

• Architect and maintain distributed training and inference pipelines, ensuring scalability and cost efficiency.

• Develop observability and monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, tracing) to ensure reliability and performance in production deployments.

• Strong background in machine learning engineering, with experience in post-training, RL, or large-scale model alignment.

• Experience with applied data workflows and evaluation frameworks for large models or agents (e.g., SWE-Bench, HELM, EvalFlow, internal eval pipelines).

• Deep expertise in distributed training/inference frameworks (e.g., vLLM, sglang, Ray, Accelerate).

• Experience deploying containerized systems at scale (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform).

• Track record of research contributions (publications, open-source contributions, benchmarks) in ML/RL.

• Passion for advancing the state-of-the-art in reasoning, measurement, and building practical, agentic AI systems.

• Cash Compensation Range of $150-300k + equity incentives

• Flexible Work (remote or San Francisco)

• Visa Sponsorship & relocation support

• Professional Development budget

• Team Off-sites & conference attendance

You’ll join a mission-driven team working at the frontier of open, superintelligence infra. In this role, you’ll have the opportunity to:

• Shape the evolution of agent-driven, data-informed solutions—from research breakthroughs to production systems used by real customers.

• Collaborate with leading researchers, engineers, and partners pushing the boundaries of RL, evaluation, and post-training.

• Grow with a fast-moving organization where your contributions directly influence both the technical direction and the broader AI ecosystem.

Ready to build the open superintelligence infrastructure of tomorrow?
Apply now to help us make powerful, open AGI accessible to everyone.

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