Research Engineer, RL Env

Mecka • New York, NY

1d • $170,000 - $300,000

About The Position

Mecka AI is building the data infrastructure layer for robotics and embodied AI. We design and operate global systems for data capture, data labeling, and hardware-enabled workflows used by leading AI labs and robotics companies to train and validate humanoid and embodied AI systems. We work closely with frontier robotics teams to bridge real-world data, simulation, learning-based systems, and deployed hardware. Build reinforcement learning environments that help researchers train models and understand their capabilities. Across Mecka's Labs team, you'll translate real tasks into computational problems, implement environments for model training and test whether measured progress reflects useful behavior. This is a hands-on research engineering role for someone who knows how to construct reinforcement learning environments. You'll write working software, investigate failures and develop methods with product colleagues, domain experts and engineers.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience formulating problems, constructing environments, training agents and critically assessing results.
• Strong programming and software debugging skills; able to build and test research systems that other people can run and extend.
• Sound experimental design and statistical reasoning, including controlled comparisons, evaluation splits, variability and the limits of benchmark results.
• Ability to reason about environment dynamics, reward design and agent behavior, and trace unexpected results to concrete causes.
• Independent research judgment and clear communication; learn unfamiliar domains, work with specialists and explain assumptions, tradeoffs and findings.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building interactive environments, simulators or benchmarks used by other researchers.
• Work on agent evaluation, reward design, imitation learning or learning from real-world data.
• Research artifacts with reproducible experiments, useful baselines and evidence of investigating failures beyond headline scores.

Responsibilities

• Define tasks, observations, actions and state transitions. Implement reset behavior, termination conditions and measurable outcomes in environments agents can interact with.
• Translate task objectives into feedback and evaluation criteria. Test whether agents can exploit scoring rules without completing the intended task.
• Implement baseline agents, train and compare policies, and design controlled experiments that isolate the effects of data, methods and environment changes.
• Separate training and held-out tasks, check for leakage, version experiments and repeat runs. Report uncertainty and performance across conditions alongside aggregate scores.
• Inspect trajectories and learning behavior to distinguish policy limitations from data, reward or environment problems. Use findings to prioritize the next experiment.
• Work with domain experts to validate task assumptions and with engineers to turn research prototypes into reusable environments, evaluation tools and documented methods.

What This Job Offers

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