Staff Software Engineer, Environments Infrastructure

Key Responsibilities

• Design widely used APIs, frameworks, and abstractions that other engineers and researchers build on, making correct usage the default and ruling out entire classes of errors structurally.
• Own the platform layers that sit beneath every environment, including the agent runtime.
• Build the tooling that lets environment owners understand, debug, and maintain their environments in production without needing an infrastructure engineer in the loop.
• Embed with research teams on a rotational basis, work directly in their codebases without slowing down the research they support, and transfer ownership when you rotate off.
• Anticipate silent failure modes and prevent them structurally through type safety, well-designed invariants, targeted testing, and refactors that reduce the room for correctness issues.
• Drive adoption of new frameworks across the organization, including deprecations and cutovers.
• Help define the engineering standards, review practices, and design patterns for a new team, and mentor researchers and engineers in adopting them.

Minimum Qualifications

• Deep expertise in Python, including static typing, safe async and concurrency patterns, and writing performant code.
• Strong taste in API and framework design, the ability to explain why an interface is right or wrong rather than just recognizing it, and a track record of other engineers or teams adopting and building on frameworks you have built.
• Experience designing or operating stateful concurrent or distributed systems, and reasoning carefully about failure, retries, idempotency, and consistency.
• A habit of verification: you measure before you conclude, and you build the checks that let a system show it's correct.
• Experience working productively in large, evolving, or research-style codebases that you didn't originally write.
• Strong written and verbal communication with collaborators of varied engineering backgrounds, and comfort with ambiguity: able to scope your own work from a loosely defined problem and drive it to a maintainable outcome.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building infrastructure, tooling, or frameworks for machine learning research or RL workflows, and familiarity with agentic systems or LLM training pipelines.
• Experience building agent frameworks, orchestration engines, or multi-agent systems, including checkpoint and restore, replay, and coordination of long-running stateful processes.
• Experience using AI coding tools on code where correctness matters, with good judgment about what to delegate and how to make the results verifiable.
• Experience building client libraries or SDKs on top of sandboxed, containerized, or remote execution platforms.
• Experience with large-scale data processing, dataset lifecycle management, or data lineage systems.
• Experience designing serialization schemes, plugin systems, or extensible class hierarchies used across an organization.
• Experience embedding with or consulting for other teams and handing off systems for others to own, or defining code standards adopted across teams, or prior experience as a technical lead.

Representative Projects

• Design a base RL environment abstraction that can be subclassed to support the large majority of environments built across RL.
• Redesign the model-tool interface for sandboxed agentic environments so that state is guaranteed to survive serialization, making it structurally impossible to write a tool that silently loses state.
• Design the state-sharing and recovery model for multi-agent workloads, so that losing a sandbox partway through a task becomes a transparent resume rather than lost work.
• Define the failure and retry model for a sandboxed execution platform, distinguishing infrastructure faults from genuine task outcomes so that each is handled correctly.
• Build the tooling that lets an environment owner diagnose why their environment is unhealthy in a production run, and fix it themselves.

Annual Salary: $405000—$605000 USD

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.