Research Scientist
San FranciscoFull-timePosted 1mo ago
About the role
Research Scientist at idler focused on measuring and improving how models learn from tasks, maximizing learning signal per unit time, and developing datasets and data-quality techniques in production at a frontier lab.
Responsibilities
- Work with customers — researchers at frontier labs — to design novel post-training recipes and data quality measurement techniques
- Design and run our in-house post-training stack to measure model lift on our tasks
- Develop new data products based on datasets and experts available to us
- Identify opportunities to take advantage of self-reinforcing exponential feedback loops
- Create agents to analyze thousands of environments and millions of trajectories
- Help curate and specify task distributions for new corpora
- Work with procurement to ensure external data we acquire is suitable for refinement
- Create scalable systems for ingesting & evaluating data we are considering buying
- Develop new techniques for mining data for signal
Qualifications
- 1+ years of experience doing RL in production at a frontier lab
- Track record of post-training an LLM end to end
- Desire to drive the research roadmap and implementation on a fast-moving team
- Deep curiosity about how machines learn from data and how to extract the maximum learning signal from our tasks
Skills
Required:Reinforcement LearningPost-training / fine-tuning of LLMs
Benefits
- Competitive salary + meaningful equity
- Free meals in office
- Healthcare, 401(k), 15 days of PTO per year
- Relocation assistance
Last updated Oct 14, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Idler
Scale AI for reinforcement learning environments.
Idler builds reinforcement learning environments that teach AI models to code at expert human levels. We create training environments based on real-world coding scenarios that prepare models for the complex challenges they'll face in production.
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