AI Research Engineer Jobs at Startups

Turing

Turing is seeking a Research Engineer to contribute to the development of frontier-quality datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and evaluations for state-of-the-art models. This role involves close collaboration with client researchers and engineers, translating research goals into technical proposals and data specifications, and overseeing technical execution. You will be responsible for building quality and verification systems to ensure deliverables meet high standards for correctness, realism, diversity, and measurable model lift. The work is bespoke, focusing on a single frontier lab client to build deep context and relationships, with flexibility to support other accounts. Success is measured by both turnaround time and quality. This position is ideal for individuals experienced in building and improving deep learning systems, with a strong emphasis on data quality, curation, denoising, synthetic data generation, and rigorous evaluation.

Salary not listed

Turing

Turing is seeking a Research Engineer to contribute to the development of cutting-edge AI datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and evaluations for leading AI labs and enterprise clients. This is a hands-on, research-focused technical leadership role where you will collaborate with customer researchers and engineers to define data and environment specifications based on their model and post-training objectives. You will be responsible for driving the production of high-quality data that meets stringent standards for correctness, realism, diversity, difficulty, and measurable model improvement. The role is ideal for individuals with approximately 4-5 years of experience in building and refining deep learning systems, particularly those where data quality, curation, denoising, synthetic data generation, and rigorous evaluation are critical for success. You will operate within one or more specialized capability areas, including coding and software engineering agents, RL environments, multimodal data and reasoning, STEM reasoning, and modern embodied AI agents.

Salary not listed

HUD is building reliable, fair, and open infrastructure for AI data, aiming to make data valuable for creators and trustworthy for AI training labs. As a Senior Research Infrastructure Engineer, you will accelerate research on training and evaluating frontier AI agents by building the software and infrastructure that enables researchers to iterate on environments, collect trajectories, and evaluate model behavior. You will collaborate closely with research engineers to understand their needs, identify bottlenecks, and transform research code into robust, reusable systems, owning the tools, pipelines, and execution infrastructure that support their exploration and scaling of promising approaches.

$175k - $260k

Sieve

Sieve is seeking its first Robotics Researcher to lead the training and evaluation of world-action models (WAMs) and 3D perception systems. This role focuses on understanding how data shapes robot capabilities, connecting data curation and labeling to measurable gains in robot learning. You will manage projects from inception to completion, identifying model shortcomings, determining data needs, setting up experiments, and testing results on unseen tasks and environments. A significant portion of this work involves 3D, transforming raw multimodal and egocentric video into actionable data for robot learning by incorporating geometry, pose, and action. Simulation will be used as a tool for evaluation and augmentation when beneficial, but not as the primary focus.

Salary not listed

Outset is building AI systems, referred to as digital twins, that represent specific real people and can respond to research questions as those individuals would. These systems are used by global brands to gain deeper qualitative insights about their users at unprecedented speed and scale. The Digital Twins Team focuses on measuring and improving the faithfulness of these AI systems in reproducing human responses and behavior. The Research Scientist will work closely with the Head Scientist to define research questions, design studies, establish measurement criteria, interpret findings, and contribute to internal decision-making and potential academic publications. This role requires a strong background in computational social science, data science, survey methodology, human-computation interaction, and experiment design.

$200k - $240k

Outset is building AI-powered user interviews, creating digital twins that represent specific real people and respond to research questions as those individuals would. The Digital Twins Team focuses on measuring and improving how faithfully these AI systems reproduce human responses and behavior. As a Research Engineer, you will report to the Head Scientist and be responsible for building and maintaining the systems that enable the team's scientists to conduct their studies correctly, reproducibly, and at scale. Your role involves ensuring experiments execute as designed, results are reproducible, and research code stays aligned with the shipped product, supporting scientists in a computational research setting with hands-on experience in LLM-based systems.

$200k - $240k

Etched is building AI systems that accelerate its own development. As a Research Engineer on the RL Frontiers team, you will train proprietary frontier models to automate kernel development, ASIC engineering, production pipelines, and 3-D hardware operating systems. You will use proprietary simulators and environments to create custom data mixes and post-train models to SOTA performance on the company's hardest engineering tasks. The company is focused on inference and bets on transformer architectures, aiming to capture the entire inference market. Etched is a fully in-person team in San Jose, valuing engineering skills and expecting technical staff to contribute to both engineering and research across disciplines.

From $400k

Sygaldry Technologies

Sygaldry Technologies is developing quantum-accelerated AI servers to dramatically speed up AI training and inference. By merging quantum computing with AI, the company aims to accelerate the development of superintelligence and ensure its efficient and affordable operation. Their unique approach involves integrating multiple qubit types into a single, fault-tolerant architecture to achieve the necessary cost, scale, and speed for advanced AI applications. Sygaldry is at the forefront of new discoveries in physics, engineering, and AI, tackling complex challenges with a grounded, optimistic, and rigorous culture. They are seeking individuals passionate about defining the future at the intersection of quantum and AI and driving its global impact.

$125k - $145k

Genmo is a research lab developing sophisticated video world models to understand, simulate, and interact with the physical world, aiming to unlock the right brain of AGI. We are seeking an exceptional Research Scientist to focus on alignment and post-training techniques for large-scale video generation models. This role is at the forefront of ensuring our diffusion-based video models reliably produce high-quality, physically accurate, and safe outputs that align with human preferences and values.

Salary not listed

Prime Intellect

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack, a platform designed to unify compute, environments, evaluations, and high-performance training for AI labs. Their platform, Lab, supports full-stack systems for post-training at frontier scale, including SFT, RL, tool use, agent workflows, and continuous model improvement. They are focused on creating open-source models for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research and the platform their own research team uses. The company aims to provide AI companies and research teams with the ability to transform their workflows, tools, and data into owned superintelligence.

$150k - $300k

Genmo is a research lab focused on developing advanced video world models to understand, simulate, and interact with the physical world, aiming to unlock the right brain of AGI. We are seeking an exceptional Research Scientist to pioneer cutting-edge diffusion models for text-to-video generation. This role involves creating novel architectures and algorithms to transform written descriptions into high-quality, coherent video content, pushing the boundaries of physical intelligence and enabling robots to learn and act in dynamic environments.

Salary not listed

Prime Intellect

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack, providing infrastructure for AI labs. Their platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, and training for post-training at scale, including SFT, RL, tool use, and agent workflows. They are focused on open-source models trained for long-horizon tasks and the platform used to build them. The company has raised significant funding from prominent investors and is seeking individuals to work at the intersection of frontier research, infrastructure, and go-to-market strategy for a nascent category.

$150k - $300k

Prime Intellect

Prime Intellect is building an open superintelligence stack, providing infrastructure for AI labs. Their platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, and training for post-training at scale, including SFT, RL, tool use, agent workflows, and continuous model improvement. They are focused on open-source models for long-horizon tasks and the platform their research team uses. The company has raised significant funding from prominent investors and is looking for individuals passionate about building at the intersection of frontier research, infrastructure, and go-to-market strategy for a nascent category.

$150k - $300k

Prime Intellect

Prime Intellect is developing an open superintelligence stack, providing infrastructure that AI labs typically build internally to ambitious AI teams. Their platform, Lab, integrates compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment for post-training at scale, covering SFT, RL, tool use, agent workflows, and continuous model improvement. They are focused on building open-source frontier AI models trained for long-horizon tasks and the platform their research team uses. The company has secured significant funding from prominent investors and AI leaders, and is seeking individuals passionate about building at the intersection of frontier research, infrastructure, and go-to-market strategy for a nascent category.

$150k - $300k

Together AI

The Speculative Decoding team at Together AI focuses on developing draft models and algorithms to accelerate large language model generation without altering outputs. Their work integrates model training, inference algorithms, and serving systems, optimizing all three for reduced cost and latency. As a research intern, you will explore open questions in speculative decoding, including new drafter architectures, verification schemes, knowledge distillation, and adaptive drafters. You will train and fine-tune draft models at scale on GPU clusters and evaluate your solutions against realistic serving workloads, such as long-context and agentic traffic.

Salary not listed

Prime Intellect

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack, providing infrastructure for AI labs. Their platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, and training for post-training at frontier scale. They are developing open-source models for long-horizon tasks and the platform their research team uses. The company has raised $150M from prominent investors and AI leaders. They are seeking individuals passionate about building at the intersection of frontier research, infrastructure, and go-to-market strategy for a nascent category. This role focuses on building the data foundation for Prime Intellect's next generation of open models. You will identify and process valuable data sources, transforming them into training-ready corpora. Your work will directly influence both broad pretraining efforts and the development of specific capabilities like reasoning, coding, and long-context learning. You will collaborate closely with researchers to test and refine data strategies, ensuring the data effectively improves model performance.

$150k - $350k

Together AI

The Speculative Decoding team at Together AI focuses on developing draft models and algorithms to accelerate large language model generation without altering outputs. Our work spans model training, inference algorithms, and serving systems, aiming to reduce generation cost and latency. As a research intern, you will explore open questions in speculative decoding, including new drafter architectures, verification schemes, knowledge distillation, and adaptive drafters. You will train and fine-tune draft models at scale on GPU clusters and evaluate your ideas against realistic serving workloads, such as long-context and agentic traffic. Projects are designed to address key research questions in speculative decoding, leading to faster generation on frontier models, drafters that adapt to changing workloads, and robust evaluation under real traffic.

Salary not listed

Prime Intellect

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack, providing infrastructure for AI labs. Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment for post-training at frontier scale. We are developing open-source models trained end-to-end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, alongside the full-stack platform our research team utilizes. We are seeking individuals passionate about building at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a nascent category.

$150k - $350k

Prime Intellect

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack, a full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale. Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment. We are developing open-source models trained end-to-end for long-horizon tasks and the platform our research team uses to build them. This role is for someone who wants to build at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a new category. As a Research Engineer, you will build the tasks and environments that train our models through RL, and the evaluations that measure their capabilities. You will collaborate directly with researchers to diagnose model failures, examining both task implementation and success scoring.

$150k - $350k

Prime Intellect

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack, a platform designed to unify compute, environments, evaluations, and deployment for frontier-scale AI development. We are creating open-source models trained for long-horizon tasks and the full-stack platform our research team uses to build them. We are looking for individuals passionate about building at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a nascent category.

$150k - $350k

Prime Intellect

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack, a full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale, from SFT and RL to tool use and agent workflows. We are developing open-source models trained end-to-end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the platform our own research team uses to build them. We are seeking individuals passionate about building at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a nascent category. This role will focus on developing the algorithms and systems used to train our open models with reinforcement learning, with opportunities to specialize in RL algorithms, scaling research, or training frameworks.

$150k - $350k

Our Internal Acceleration team is building agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens. You will work directly with founders and embed with our kernels team to develop new agentic harnesses and operating systems, transforming hardware development in an AI-native world. This role focuses on harnesses, tool use, context, memory, execution environments, and evaluations that enable agents to perform long-running, useful engineering work. We seek engineers who thrive in ambiguity, possess strong product sense, and are eager to own problems end-to-end, understanding that this is a time-sensitive and business-critical role that may not adhere to a 9-5 schedule.

$150k - $400k

We are seeking a Software Engineer II to join our growing India team and help build our Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) platform. This platform consists of interactive systems where frontier AI models learn to complete real-world tasks across various domains like software engineering, finance, and legal research. The interaction data generated is crucial for training and evaluating leading AI models. In this role, you will collaborate closely with US-based Engineering, Research, Product, and Operations teams to develop the next generation of AI platforms. You will own significant technical projects, contribute to platform architecture, and build reliable systems that enable rapid development and evaluation of AI models.

Salary not listed

Cognition

We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents, known for creating Devin, the first AI software engineer. Our team comprises world-class talent from leading AI companies. We are seeking a founding member for our safety team to tackle critical challenges in AI safety and alignment. This role is hands-on, focusing on ensuring our AI agents behave correctly and safely in real-world applications, rather than solely in research benchmarks. You will play a pivotal role in shaping the safety and alignment of our AI systems.

Salary not listed