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Forward Deployed Engineer, RL Environments

140k – 200kSan Francisco, CAHybrid2+ YOE
Summary

Builds and maintains sandboxed, reproducible RL environments for AI agent training, including terminal, browser, and tool-augmented setups. Requires 2+ years Python/systems engineering, containerization, and RL concepts understanding.

About the role

What You’ll Do

  • Design, build, and maintain sandboxed RL environments for agentic AI training—including terminal emulators, browser automation harnesses, computer-use simulators, and tool-augmented workspaces (e.g., environments built on frameworks like TerminalBench, OSWorld, and Tau-bench)
  • Develop reproducible, containerized execution environments (Docker, VMs, lightweight sandboxes) that support deterministic task rollouts and reward signal collection
  • Integrate with and extend open-source agentic tooling and custom CLI/API harnesses to enable multi-step agent interaction
  • Build instrumentation and observability layers—structured logging, trajectory capture, state snapshotting—so training runs and human annotation sessions produce clean, auditable data
  • Collaborate with data operations to design task curricula and evaluation protocols that stress-test model capabilities across environment types
  • Own environment deployment and reliability: CI/CD pipelines, automated testing of environment configurations, and monitoring for drift or breakage across versions
  • Rapidly prototype new environment types as client and internal requirements evolve, moving from spec to working system in days, not weeks

What We’re Looking For

Required

  • 2+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong fundamentals in Python and at least one systems-level language (Go, Rust, C++)
  • Demonstrated experience with containerization and sandboxing (Docker, Podman, Firecracker, or similar) in production or near-production contexts
  • Familiarity with RL concepts: MDPs, reward shaping, episode structure, observation/action spaces. You don’t need to have trained models, but you need to understand what an environment must provide to an RL training loop
  • Experience building or maintaining developer tooling, CLI tools, or infrastructure automation
  • Comfort working with browser automation frameworks or terminal interaction tooling
  • Strong debugging instincts—you can trace failures across process boundaries, container layers, and network calls
  • Ability to read and implement from academic papers and open-source benchmark repositories without extensive hand-holding

Preferred

  • Direct experience building or contributing to RL environments (Gymnasium/Gym, PettingZoo, or custom environment implementations)
  • Experience with agentic AI evaluation frameworks (SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld, TerminalBench, or similar)
  • Familiarity with GCP or AWS infrastructure (Compute Engine, ECS/EKS, Cloud Build)
  • Prior work at an AI data company, ML platform company, or AI research lab
  • Contributions to open-source projects in the RL, agents, or dev-tools space

Compensation

Annual base salary range $140,000—$200,000 USD

Skills
PythonDockerGoRustC++Reinforcement LearningGymnasiumPettingZooGCPAWS
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