Abundant
AI & Machine LearningDirect Ashby career site

Member of Technical Staff, Research

Pay
$250,000 – $450,000 per year
Location
San Francisco, CA · On-site
Job type
Full-time
Level
Mid-level
Listed
31 days ago

Skills & highlights for this role

  • reinforcement learning
  • agentic evaluation design
  • Python
  • reward signal design
  • post-training

Also useful

  • RLHF
  • RLAIF
  • NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR publications
  • Terminal-Bench
  • SWE-bench

Stated benefits & perks

  • Health
  • Dental
  • Vision
  • Flexible pto

The Role

You will own a research agenda where research meets production, co-designing strategies with researchers from frontier AI labs. You are the “PM of the model”: you pick the problem, design the data and reward signal that moves it, and see it through to a live training run. The job rewards a founder mentality and extreme ownership, including going into unfamiliar domains, from chemical engineering to complex legal logic, and getting to ground truth fast on problems others have written off.

What You’ll Do

  • Foundational capability research and execution. Architect and execute a research agenda to find simple, generalizable ideas that advance model reasoning at scale, and own it from hypothesis through to running in live systems.
  • Design tasks and verifiers that stay hard. Build long-horizon agentic tasks that are still difficult a model generation from now, with graders where partial credit means something and the obvious exploit does not score.
  • Diagnose failure modes. Read trajectories until you can say why a model fails a class of work, then turn that into the data or reward signal that fixes it. This is the core loop of the job.
  • Model alignment and data strategy. Partner with the world’s most advanced AI research teams on datasets and benchmarks that shape how frontier models behave, focused on alignment, safety, and reward signal design.
  • Autonomous problem selection. Identify, scope, and run long projects, choosing the problems that matter most for scaling data toward AGI.
  • System infrastructure. Work with engineering on data pipelines, internal tooling, and deep learning implementations. If a workflow produces bad data, you fix the workflow.

Who You Are

  • You write a lot of code. Strong software engineering and deep Python, comfortable owning a system end to end and debugging through layers you did not write.
  • You have built evaluations, RL environments, agent harnesses, verifiers, or execution sandboxes, and you have opinions about which of them can be trusted.
  • You have shipped research into production, particularly post-training, distillation, and high-stakes evaluation.
  • You have worked on large-scale agent systems: orchestration frameworks, tool APIs, distributed execution, observability, and logging.
  • You get to ground truth in an unfamiliar domain by building something and reading outputs, not by reading about it.
  • You notice the misspecified task, the ambiguous prompt, and the grader that can be gamed.
  • You have a thoughtful perspective on the societal and safety impacts of deploying general-purpose AI systems.

Nice to Have

  • A PhD (CS, ML, NLP) and publications at NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR. Neither is required.
  • Work on public benchmarks or task suites, for example Terminal-Bench, SWE-bench-style harnesses, or HCAST.
  • RLHF or RLAIF experience and a view on how training choices show up in model behavior.
  • Experience running work through large expert or annotation operations.

Compensation

  • Base Salary $250,000 - $450,000
  • Cash Bonus
  • Sizable performance bonus tied to project and company milestones
  • Equity
  • Generous early-stage grant

Benefits

Health, dental, vision + flexible PTO

About Abundant

Abundant is an applied research lab focused on scaling reinforcement learning for safe and reliable agentic capabilities. We are an extremely talent-dense team of researchers, roboticists, founders, and operators whose work includes the Waymo Driver.

Read the original posting

From Abundant's careers page, first listed on Rolev.ai on October 10, 2026. Rolev.ai is not the employer.

How Rolev.ai helps with this application

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Common questions

What is the salary for the Member of Technical Staff, Research role at Abundant?

The Member of Technical Staff, Research posting at Abundant states compensation of $250,000 – $450,000 per year. It is listed as a full-time position. Final pay may depend on location, experience, and interview evaluation on Abundant's official career site.

Where is the Member of Technical Staff, Research job at Abundant located?

This Member of Technical Staff, Research position at Abundant is located in San Francisco, CA (On-site). Always check Abundant's application page for specific state eligibility or relocation policies.

What qualifications are required for Member of Technical Staff, Research at Abundant?

For the Member of Technical Staff, Research role, Abundant highlights experience with reinforcement learning, agentic evaluation design, Python, reward signal design, post-training. Rolev.ai can score your existing resume against these requirements and show any skill gaps before you apply.

How do I apply for the Member of Technical Staff, Research position at Abundant?

This listing links directly to Abundant's Ashby application page. You can apply directly on Abundant's site, or use Rolev.ai to check your resume fit, generate a zero-hallucination tailored resume and cover letter for this posting, and autofill the Ashby application form in 1 click with the Rolev.ai Chrome extension. You always review the form and press Submit yourself.