Member of Technical Staff - Research

Patronus AI, Inc.•San Francisco, CA

1d•$175,000 - $300,000•Onsite

About The Position

Patronus AI is a frontier lab developing simulation research and infrastructure to accelerate progress toward human-aligned AGI. We are on a mission to simulate all of the world’s intelligence. We are the team behind some of the earliest and most influential research in AI evaluation like FinanceBench, Lynx, SimpleSafetyTests, CopyrightCatcher, Humanity’s Last Exam, and more. We are formerly AI researchers and engineers from companies like Meta AI, Amazon AGI, and Google. Our customers include foundation model labs and Fortune 500 enterprises like Adobe. We are backed by top-tier investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Notable Capital, Stanford University, Noam Brown, Gokul Rajaram, and more.

Requirements

An MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.
Experience conducting independent research in reinforcement learning, NLP, agentic systems, evaluation, alignment, or related areas.
Demonstrated ability to take open-ended research problems from 0→1 and deliver high-impact outcomes.
Strong experimental skills, including experiment design, analysis, and interpretation of results.
Experience writing clean, reproducible research code in Python and modern machine learning frameworks.
Ability to execute quickly and independently with minimal guidance while maintaining a high bar for research quality.
Experience collaborating cross-functionally with research, engineering, and product teams.
Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical ideas succinctly.
Strong integrity, good judgment, and respect for others.

Nice To Haves

Eagerness to learn
Passion for research
Creativity in problem solving
Proactive mindset

Responsibilities

Own ambitious research projects end-to-end, from identifying and formulating open-ended problems through experiment design, execution, analysis, and production impact.
Advance research in agent simulation, reinforcement learning, and scalable oversight, including agent cognition, behavior analysis, reward design, and new training methods.
Design state-of-the-art simulation and RL environments for training and evaluating frontier agents, spanning tools and actions, observations and state, trajectories, curricula, and reward systems.
Develop methods to understand and improve agent behavior across complex, long-horizon tasks, including reasoning, planning, adaptation, generalization, and reward hacking.
Run rigorous experiments and turn findings into measurable outcomes, including new techniques, benchmarks, datasets, environments, platform capabilities, and research publications.
Build high-quality, reproducible research systems, writing production-level code and partnering closely with engineering and product to translate research into real-world systems.
Contribute to Patronus AI’s research direction and thought leadership, staying at the frontier of the field, collaborating with the research community, and publishing or open sourcing our work.