Staff Software Engineer, Code RL

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

You'll be part of a team solving the engineering side of research efforts such as embedding with research teams, getting up to speed on their systems and needs, and designing the frameworks, APIs, and infrastructure that let researchers move faster, then rotating off, leaving behind well-oiled systems those teams can understand, own, and maintain themselves. Your remit also includes the ongoing health of production RL runs: maintainable, monitored, and straightforward to triage.

What it asks for · 6

• Deep expertise in Python, including static typing, safe async and concurrency patterns, and writing performant Python code
• A track record of designing intuitive, safe APIs or frameworks that other engineers or teams adopted and built on
• Experience working productively in large, evolving, or research-style codebases that you didn't originally write
• Demonstrated ability to anticipate failure modes — especially silent ones — and prevent them structurally through system design, type safety, and testing
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain system designs to collaborators with varied engineering backgrounds
• Comfort with ambiguity: able to scope your own work from a loosely defined problem and drive it to a maintainable outcome

Also a plus

• Experience building infrastructure, tooling, or frameworks for machine learning research or RL workflows
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning concepts, agentic systems, or LLM training pipelines
• Experience building or operating large-scale distributed systems
• Experience building client libraries or SDKs on top of sandboxed, containerized, or remote execution platforms
• Experience with large-scale data processing or dataset lifecycle management
• Experience designing plugin systems or extensible class hierarchies used across an organization
• Experience embedding with or consulting for other teams, including successfully handing off systems for others to own
• Experience defining code standards, lint rules, or static verification approaches adopted across multiple teams

What the job covers

• Design widely-used APIs, frameworks, and abstractions that other engineers and researchers build on, with careful attention to interface legibility and principled defaults
• Embed with research teams on a rotational basis: understand their engineering needs, build systems and APIs that support their work, and transfer ownership so teams can maintain those systems after you rotate off
• Work directly in research codebases, improving reliability and structure without slowing down the research they support
• Anticipate silent failure modes and prevent them structurally through type safety, well-designed invariants, targeted testing, and refactors that shrink the surface area for bugs
• Contribute to the reliability of production RL systems, including monitoring, regression detection, and triage tooling
• Help define engineering standards, review practices, and design patterns for a new team, and mentor researchers and engineers in adopting them

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• systems12×
• design10×
• experience10×
• research8×
• code6×
• engineering6×
• frameworks6×
• researchers6×
• agentic5×
• build5×
• apis4×
• data4×
• patterns4×
• production4×
• standards4×
• abstractions3×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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