MakerMaker
AI & Machine LearningDirect Ashby career site

RESEARCHER, POST-TRAINING

Location
San Francisco, CA · On-site
Job type
Full-time
Level
Director
Experience
5+ years
Listed
23 days ago

Skills & highlights for this role

  • supervised fine-tuning
  • RLHF
  • preference data design
  • PyTorch
  • evaluation suite design

Also useful

  • distributed training
  • DPO
  • synthetic data generation

About the Role

You'll lead our work on model post-training: supervised fine-tuning, preference data, reinforcement learning from human and AI feedback, reward modeling, and the evaluation suites that tell us what's actually working. You'll own a research area that meaningfully shapes our model behavior and capability.

This is a hands-on senior research role. You'll set direction, run experiments, and ship into production. You'll partner with the data, infrastructure, and engineering teams to make the post-training pipeline reliable and fast: improvements there compound into every model we ship.

What You'll Do

  • Lead post-training research: SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, RLVR, DPO and successor methods, reward modeling, preference data design
  • Design and curate the data that goes into post-training (from sourcing, to filtering, to quality assessment)
  • Build and maintain the evaluation suites that measure what matters; resist Goodharting your own benchmarks
  • Run rigorous experiments (controls, ablations, statistical significance) and write up internal findings clearly
  • Scale data pipelines and the infrastructure team to scale training
  • Identify and characterize failure modes (reward hacking, distribution drift, eval saturation) and design experiments to address them
  • Stay current on the post-training literature; bring useful methods in, ignore the noise

What We're Looking for

  • Strong track record of post-training research (SFT, RL, reward modeling) at a frontier-model lab or equivalent
  • 5+ years of hands-on ML research experience
  • Comfort with large-scale data curation and preference-data pipelines
  • Experience designing evaluation suites for capabilities that aren't easily benchmarked
  • Fluent in PyTorch or equivalent; comfortable at the scale of distributed training
  • Strong statistical instincts: you'd notice a flawed comparison before someone else points it out
  • Strong written communication

Nice to Have

  • PhD in ML, statistics, CS, or adjacent
  • Published research at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, COLM, RLC, or comparable venues
  • Experience with reward hacking detection, scaling reward models, or RLHF infrastructure
  • Synthetic data generation experience
  • Background in RL math (policy gradients, importance sampling, off-policy methods)
  • Open-source contributions to post-training infrastructure

This Role Is Probably Not for You If

  • You're primarily interested in pretraining (that's a different role)- You'd rather invent novel methods in isolation than ship them into a model that real users run
  • You prefer benchmarks that are stable to evaluation work where the right answer isn't yet defined

About the Company

We're building autonomous research agents for recursive self-improvement (multi-agent systems that propose, run, and analyze machine learning experiments). We're a small, well-funded team that works onsite in San Francisco.

Read the original posting

From MakerMaker's careers page, first listed on Rolev.ai on October 17, 2026. Rolev.ai is not the employer.

How Rolev.ai helps with this application

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Common questions

Where is the RESEARCHER, POST-TRAINING job at MakerMaker located?

This RESEARCHER, POST-TRAINING position at MakerMaker is located in San Francisco, CA (On-site). Always check MakerMaker's application page for specific state eligibility or relocation policies.

What qualifications are required for RESEARCHER, POST-TRAINING at MakerMaker?

For the RESEARCHER, POST-TRAINING role, MakerMaker highlights 5+ years of relevant experience; experience with supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, preference data design, PyTorch, evaluation suite design. Rolev.ai can score your existing resume against these requirements and show any skill gaps before you apply.

How do I apply for the RESEARCHER, POST-TRAINING position at MakerMaker?

This listing links directly to MakerMaker's Ashby application page. You can apply directly on MakerMaker'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.