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Member of Technical Staff - Research

Patronus AI· Research and Engineering
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San Francisco, CA$175k - $300kFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Researcher role at Patronus AI focusing on foundational research in agentic AI systems, reinforcement learning, simulations, and scalable oversight to shape evaluation, training, and deployment of frontier models.

Responsibilities

  • Own ambitious research projects end-to-end, from identifying and formulating open-ended problems through experiment design, execution, analysis, and production impact.
  • Advance research in agent simulation, reinforcement learning, and scalable oversight, including agent cognition, behavior analysis, reward design, and new training methods.
  • Design state-of-the-art simulation and RL environments for training and evaluating frontier agents, spanning tools and actions, observations and state, trajectories, curricula, and reward systems.
  • Train models and experiment with post-training algorithms, including GRPO and SFT. Run ablations with open source models and understand the impact of distillation, COT reasoning, sparse and dense rewards and hyperparameters.
  • Develop methods to understand and improve agent behavior across complex, long-horizon tasks, including reasoning, planning, adaptation, generalization, and reward hacking.
  • Run rigorous experiments and turn findings into measurable outcomes, including new techniques, benchmarks, datasets, environments, platform capabilities, and research publications.
  • Build high-quality, reproducible research systems, writing production-level code and partnering closely with engineering and product to translate research into real-world systems.
  • Contribute to Patronus AI’s research direction and thought leadership, staying at the frontier of the field, collaborating with the research community, and publishing or open sourcing our work.

Qualifications

  • An MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.
  • Experience conducting independent research in reinforcement learning, NLP, agentic systems, evaluation, alignment, or related areas.
  • Demonstrated ability to take open-ended research problems from 0→1 and deliver high-impact outcomes.
  • Strong experimental skills, including experiment design, analysis, and interpretation of results.
  • Experience writing clean, reproducible research code in Python and modern machine learning frameworks.
  • Ability to execute quickly and independently with minimal guidance while maintaining a high bar for research quality.
  • Experience collaborating cross-functionally with research, engineering, and product teams.
  • Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical ideas succinctly.
  • Strong integrity, good judgment, and respect for others.

Skills

Required:MS/PhD in quantitative fieldReinforcement LearningExperiment design and analysisPython and ML frameworksCommunication

Benefits

  • Competitive salary and equity packages
  • 15 days of paid vacation per annum
  • Parental & sick leave
  • Health, dental, and vision insurance plans
  • 401(k) plan + matching
  • In-office lunch & dinner
  • Whoop band
  • Monthly meal stipend
  • Monthly health and wellness stipend
  • Equinox membership
  • Fun global offsites!
Last updated Oct 24, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Patronus AI

Simulating the World's Intelligence

Patronus AI develops simulation research and infrastructure to accelerate progress toward human-aligned AGI

SimulationWorld ModelsDigital World ModelsAI researchAGIResearchSoftware Development
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