Research Engineer, Synthetic Data

CLERA, LLC
San Francisco, CA, United States
about 1 month ago
Apply on www.indeed.com
Prepare application

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Experience level
Experienced
Experience required
2 years minimum
Compensation
$150,000.0 - $250,000.0
Working hours
Regular working hours
Job source

Tech stack

Training Data Artificial Intelligence Automation of Tests Python (Programming Language) Linux System Administration Reinforcement Learning Large Language Models Data Pipelines Docker

Job description

  • Build and maintain the synthetic data pipeline, turning domain-specific workflows into realistic, structured, and challenging training tasks for AI agents.
  • Collaborate with subject-matter experts across professional and technical domains to design high-quality synthetic tasks.
  • Design synthetic task generation methods that produce diverse, realistic, and learnable data at scale.
  • Build tooling to mutate, validate, and iteratively improve synthetic tasks.
  • Analyze model and agent performance on synthetic tasks to understand what they teach and where they break down.
  • Develop metrics to quantify synthetic task diversity, realism, learnability, and overall quality.

Requirements

Required

  • 2-4 years of relevant engineering experience.
  • Proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments.
  • Hands-on experience with synthetic data research methods.
  • Strong intuition for what makes synthetic data “good” - and an honest understanding of its limitations.
  • Demonstrated ability to build synthetic data pipelines end-to-end without a fully prescribed roadmap.
  • Experience working with environments, evaluations, and benchmarks.
  • Detail-oriented mindset for spotting subtle inconsistencies and edge cases in synthetic data.
  • Ability to reason from first principles about task design, scoring functions, and failure modes.
  • Comfort thriving in unstructured, early-stage environments where you define the path forward.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills for async, cross-timezone collaboration.

Nice to Have

  • Background in reinforcement learning or post-training data for large language models.
  • Experience building reward signals, graders, or automated QA systems for agent tasks.
  • Prior work at an early-stage AI or ML startup.

Benefits & conditions

  • Salary: $150,000 - $250,000 USD annually, depending on experience.
  • Visa sponsorship: Available.
  • Equity participation in a well-funded, early-stage AI company.

About the company

We’re an early-stage AI infrastructure company (11-50 people) building the foundational platform for reinforcement learning environments - the tooling that lets AI labs and businesses encode real-world expertise into scalable training and evaluation pipelines. Our engineering team of ~15 includes Olympiad medalists and published researchers, and we’re growing it with Research Engineers who want to do hard, impactful work on synthetic data at the frontier of AI alignment.

In this role, you’ll own the synthetic data pipeline end-to-end: transforming domain-specific workflows into structured, realistic, and challenging training tasks for AI agents. You’ll work directly with subject-matter experts, design generation and validation systems, and develop the metrics that tell us whether synthetic tasks are actually teaching models what we want.

Apply for this position

This job is hosted externally. Click below to view the full posting and apply.

Apply on www.indeed.com
Prepare application

Good distractions

Talks and stories from around this role — technically off-topic, practically not.

2:11 min

Data and simulation requirements for AI robotics

Teresa Conceicao · World Congress 2022

2:07 min

Inspecting default bridge architectures and custom Docker networks

Oliver Seitz Oliver Seitz · World Congress 2025

2:20 min

Architecting language translation with focused training data

Jaroslaw Kutylowski Jaroslaw Kutylowski +1 · World Congress 2023

6:08 min

Applying software engineering environments and testing to data pipelines

Matthias Niehoff Matthias Niehoff · World Congress 2024

1:46 min

Overcoming data scarcity with synthetic data generation

Anshul Jindal Anshul Jindal +1 · World Congress 2026 Europe

2:34 min

Docker sandbox architecture and microVM environment integration

Manuel de la Peña Manuel de la Peña · World Congress 2026 Europe

Videos

See all

Related articles

See all