Research Engineer, Post-Training
Hybrid (San Francisco)$231k - $340kFull-timePosted 3mo ago
About the role
Post-training-focused role to scale Harvey's feedback-to-model loop, designing and running model training experiments, interpreting results, and collaborating with internal and external research partners to improve data, environments, graders, and training recipes for legal work.
Responsibilities
- Drive post-training experiments, pushing agent performance while navigating the Pareto frontier of cost, latency, security, and governance.
- Optimize agent harnesses, including domain-specific skills, tools, subagents, retrieval strategies, and validation loops that improve quality on long-horizon legal work.
- Design and develop grading and reward systems that are reliable enough for evaluation, efficient enough for iteration, and strict enough for high-stakes legal work.
- Study agent behavior, identifying patterns that correlate with successful work product, and converting those findings into training data, evals, or harness changes.
- Work with Harvey researchers and external research partners to define experiments, evaluate methodology, review results, and keep projects moving toward concrete model improvements.
Qualifications
- Hands-on experience with post-training or model-training work, such as SFT, preference optimization, RLHF/RLAIF, reward modeling, distillation, or adapting open-weight models to specialized domains.
- Strong judgment about model behavior: you can read traces, inspect outputs, identify failure modes, and reason about whether a metric is measuring the thing that matters.
- Strong Python and research-engineering ability. You can write clean code, debug experiments, and build the simple but reliable systems needed to make research move faster.
- Ability to self-manage ambiguous applied research projects and communicate clearly with researchers, engineers, product teams, domain experts, and external partners.
Skills
Required:Post-training / model-training experiencePython
Benefits
- Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage
- 401k match up to 4%
- flexible PTO
- Eligibility to participate in equity plan and benefits program
Last updated Aug 5, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Harvey
Professional Class AI
Harvey is a platform built to meet the standards of the world’s leading professional service firms.
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