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Founding RL Engineer

CleraSan Francisco🇺🇸United StatesPosted Oct 12, 2026

Why This Role Stands Out

As a Founding RL Engineer at Clera, you'll have the unique opportunity to shape the technical direction of an early-stage AI team and build core systems from the ground up. This role is perfect for a mid-senior engineer with practical RL experience who thrives on innovation and wants to make a significant impact in a growing company. Apply now to be at the forefront of AI development!

Quick Overview

Seniority
Mid Senior
Employment type
Full Time
Work mode
On Site
Location
San Francisco, United States
Posted
14 hours ago
Machine LearningLLMPyTorchPython

Job Description

About the Role

Join an early-stage AI team as a Founding Reinforcement Learning Engineer, building core systems for training and evaluating AI agents. You will own the process from environment design through model training and evaluation, and help shape the team's technical direction.

What You'll Do

  • Design and build reinforcement learning environments, reward functions, and training pipelines.

  • Train and fine-tune models using methods such as PPO, GRPO, DPO, RLHF, and RLAIF.

  • Build evaluation frameworks to measure model and agent performance.

  • Run experiments, analyze results, and guide research priorities.

  • Scale training across GPU clusters and maintain reliable pipelines.

  • Bring research ideas into production systems and help establish engineering practices.

  • Contribute to hiring as the engineering team grows.

What We're Looking For

  • At least 2 years of hands-on experience in reinforcement learning or machine learning engineering.

  • Strong Python skills and deep experience with PyTorch or JAX.

  • Practical experience training models with policy gradient methods, reward modeling, RLHF, or similar techniques.

  • Experience with distributed training, GPU infrastructure, RL environments, reward functions, training pipelines, and model or agent evaluation.

  • A track record of turning research ideas into production systems.

  • A degree in computer science, mathematics, physics, or a related field; graduate study is a plus.

  • Experience with LLM post-training, agent training, simulation frameworks, or RL training libraries is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation is $125,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

This is an on-site role in San Francisco, California, United States.

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