Research Engineer

Taste Labs • San Francisco, CA

20h • $200,000 - $350,000

About The Position

Taste Labs is building data and infrastructure to help AI develop better judgment, beginning with design. The company develops post-training data and reinforcement-learning environments to teach taste to frontier models, along with context and verification tools that help agents produce more creative, on-brand, and appropriate work. Taste Labs has raised $18.5 million in seed funding, co-led by Amplify and CRV, and says most frontier labs are already customers.

As a Research Engineer, you will own full-stack machine-learning experiments, training runs, infrastructure, data and evaluation pipelines, and publication of results. You will develop internal research, evaluation design, judges, and reward models, and collaborate directly with AI labs on frontier projects.

Requirements

• Experience in post-training and evaluations or judges.
• LLM experience; experience limited to classical machine learning is not sufficient.
• A research-oriented mindset and an engineering approach, with creativity, resourcefulness, and comfort with ambiguity.
• A strong interest in taste and reducing low-quality AI-generated content.

Nice To Haves

• Startup experience is strongly preferred.
• Deep passion for creativity and design.

Responsibilities

• Train reward models, classifiers, judges, and verifiers for subjective domains such as design, writing, and visual style.
• Develop frontier evaluations and benchmarks for subjective domains.
• Run post-training experiments on open-source models to test new data formats and post-training techniques.
• Set up the infrastructure needed to run experiments.
• Collaborate with AI labs and creative experts to design pilots and experiments around taste.
• Own the end-to-end pipeline.
• Publish blogs and white papers.

What This Job Offers

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