Member of Technical Staff - Open Endedness
SF$300k - $500kFull-timePosted 3mo ago
About the role
Researchers to design and build new ways of using reinforcement learning where rewards and tasks are discovered rather than given, focusing on open-ended learning and autonomous objective generation.
Responsibilities
- Develop RL methods for agents that can discover useful objectives, tasks and curricula without relying entirely on human-specified rewards.
- Design systems for open-ended learning, including unsupervised/automated environment design, asymmetric self-play, and intrinsic motivation.
- Build training loops where agents learn from interaction, exploration, novelty, competence progress, self-generated challenges, or other nonstandard reward signals.
- Investigate how agents can avoid collapse into trivial, degenerate, or easily exploitable objectives.
- Own and develop a research agenda within Vmax, from identifying promising directions to executing experiments and communicating results.
Qualifications
- PhD or equivalent experience in machine learning, reinforcement learning, artificial intelligence, or a closely related field.
- Track record of strong technical work, demonstrated through publications, open-source projects, deployed systems, competitions, or equivalent contributions.
- Deep understanding of reinforcement learning
- Strong interest in open-ended learning
- Experience with LLM post-training
- Strong empirical research ability, including designing experiments, choosing meaningful baselines, running ablations, and diagnosing unexpected results.
- Strong programming ability in Python and experience with at least one major ML framework such as PyTorch or JAX.
- Ability to work independently on ambiguous research problems and turn high-level ideas into concrete experimental programs.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with researchers and engineers on ambiguous, fast-moving technical problems.
- Clear written and verbal communication of technical ideas, results, tradeoffs, and risks.
Skills
Required:Reinforcement learningPython programmingML frameworks (PyTorch or JAX)Open-ended learning
Last updated Jul 5, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Vmax
Vmax is developing AI capable of open-ended learning. We build systems that exceed human performance across every domain, optimizing beyond the local maxima of learning from human expertise.
Vmax is automating reinforcement learning. We transform proprietary data and evals into new sets of environments. We refine agents on new examples of the tasks they are intended to perform.
AIagentsbessemer-ai-infrastructure-2026environmentsopen-ended learningreinforcement learningreinforcement-learning-platformsresearch
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