Founding RL Engineer

True Talent Solutions Partners • San Francisco, CA

2d • Onsite

About The Position

Join an early-stage AI company as its first engineering hire, building reinforcement learning environments and AI agents. You will work closely with the co-founders, shape technical direction, and help grow the engineering team. The role is on-site in San Francisco, California, and follows a 5.5-day work week. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship and willing to relocate to San Francisco.

Base salary is $125,000 to $200,000 annually. On-target earnings, including base plus variable compensation, are $225,000 to $400,000. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Requirements

• Typically 3 or more years of experience in reinforcement learning or AI agent development, or 6 to 12 months building RL environments or data as a recent graduate.
• Experience building coding RL environments and shipping AI agents into production, with strong reinforcement learning fundamentals.
• Professional experience with Python and PyTorch or JAX.
• Hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code or Cursor.
• Experience training models with policy gradient methods, reward modeling, RLHF, or related approaches.
• Full-stack experience with TypeScript and AWS.
• Strong shipping record in a startup or AI lab environment.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship.
• Willingness to relocate to San Francisco for an in-person 5.5-day work week.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with mobile development, distributed training, GPU infrastructure, or LLM post-training.
• Familiarity with environment frameworks such as Gymnasium, Ray RLlib, Isaac, or MuJoCo, and training libraries such as TRL, verl, or OpenRLHF.
• A related degree, relevant open-source work, or publications.

Responsibilities

• Build reinforcement learning environments and tasks using voice and enterprise data.
• Develop and deploy AI agents for enterprise customers.
• Partner with the co-founders on technical direction and product roadmaps.
• Lead engineering as the team grows, balancing fast delivery with high-quality work.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed