Frontier Agents Engineer (Applied AI)

About Scale AI Scale AI is the data foundation for AI, helping organizations build and deploy reliable production AI applications. We partner with the world's leading enterprises and government organizations to accelerate their AI transformation through frontier AI systems that solve real business problems. Every day, we work with organizations across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, media and telecommunications to build production AI agents that automate complex workflows, help humans, reason over enterprise knowledge, and operate safely at scale. The Opportunity Applied AI is moving faster than ever. New foundation models, reasoning techniques, agent architectures, and research papers emerge every week. Yet building AI systems that reliably solve real-world problems remains one of the hardest engineering challenges. As a Senior Frontier Agent Engineer (Applied AI) , you'll bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and production deployment. You'll work directly with enterprise customers to design, evaluate, and deploy intelligent systems that combine frontier models with structured knowledge, retrieval, traditional machine learning, and enterprise software. Unlike traditional ML roles that focus on a single model or product, you'll work across a diverse portfolio of AI challenges spanning multiple industries and use cases. You may build a multi-agent research system and then participate in designing a customer intelligence platform, a healthcare copilot, or an autonomous workflow for a Fortune 100 company. If you enjoy reading new AI papers, experimenting with the latest models, and shipping production systems that create measurable business impact, you'll fit right in. What You'll Build Frontier AI Systems Design and deploy production AI agents that leverage the latest advances in large language models, reasoning, retrieval, memory, and tool use. Architect intelligent systems that combine LLMs, traditional machine learning, structured knowledge, enterpri

About Scale At Scale AI, our mission is to accelerate the development of AI applications. For 8 years, Scale has been the leading AI data foundry, helping fuel the most exciting advancements in AI, including: generative AI, defense applications, and autonomous vehicles. With our recent Series F round, we’re accelerating the abundance of frontier data to pave the road to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and building upon our prior model evaluation work with enterprise customers and governments, to deepen our capabilities and offerings for both public and private evaluations. About the ACE team The Agent Capabilities & Environments (ACE) team, part of Scale’s Research organization, brings together customer-facing Researchers and Applied AI Engineers. Our core mission includes research on agent environments and RL reward signals, benchmarking autonomous agent performance across real-world scenarios and environments, creating robust data programs to improve Large Language Models (LLMs) agentic capabilities and building foundational tools and frameworks for evaluating models as agents. ACE focuses on autonomous agents that dynamically interact with diverse external environments, including code repositories, GUI interfaces, browsers, and more. About This Role This role is at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and practical application, with a focus on studying the data types essential for building state-of-the-art agents, such as browser and SWE agents. The ideal candidate will explore the data landscape needed to advance intelligent, adaptable AI agents, guiding the data strategy at Scale to drive innovation. This position requires not only expertise in LLM agents and planning algorithms but also creativity in addressing novel challenges related to data, interaction, and evaluation. You will contribute to impactful research publications on agents, collaborate with customer researchers, and work alongside the engineering team to translate t

About Scale Scale’s mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world’s most important decisions. As the leading AI data foundry, we provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world’s most advanced models — fueling breakthroughs in generative AI, defense, and autonomous vehicles. We partner with leading enterprises and governments to bring AI into production that performs when it matters most, combining rigorous evaluation with full-stack deployment so our customers can build AI they can trust. About the Team Applied Intelligence Systems (AIS) is part of the Scale Generative AI Platform (SGP), focused on pushing the frontier of what agentic applications can do across diverse enterprise and government use cases. We build the infrastructure and tooling that power agentic AI in production, paired with applied ML research, design, and evaluation to ensure these systems perform reliably at the scale our customers demand. AIS spans multiple workstreams — agent evaluation and oversight, orchestration and tool-use infrastructure, model and systems optimization, and applied research on new agent capabilities — and this role is not scoped to any single one of them. We’re growing fast, with increasing traction across both commercial and public sector customers, and we’re just getting started — this team will define what dependable, production-grade agentic AI looks like. About the Role As a Staff Machine Learning Research Engineer, you will operate across the full breadth of AIS’s technical needs — wherever the hardest ML problem in agentic AI happens to be that quarter. This could mean training and fine-tuning models, designing evaluation and observability systems, building improvement loops from production data, prototyping novel agent architectures, or designing internal systems and tooling that boost productivity across teams. You’re not tied to one team’s roadmap; you’re expected to move to where the technical leverage is highest, and t

About the Team The DoorDash Research Fellowship is a 3-month program (extendable to 6 months) looking for Summer and Fall 2026 cohorts, for researchers and engineers who want to work on the hardest applied ML and AI problems in local commerce. Fellows are given the resources, autonomy, and access to real-world operational data needed to pursue ambitious research directions — with the goal of producing work that influences both the field and how DoorDash operates at scale. This program is modeled on the best external research fellowships: fellows are treated as independent researchers, not as junior employees on a product team. You pick the problem (within a set of priority areas), you own the direction, and you publish or ship the outcome. You’re excited about this opportunity because you will receive… Dedicated compute allocation sized to the research agenda — GPU clusters for training and inference budgets for experimentation Full access to DoorDash's research infrastructure — our internal RL stack, training and evaluation pipelines, RL environments built on real operational systems, agent evaluation harnesses, and the tooling our own research teams use day-to-day. Fellows are first-class users, not sandboxed visitors. Access to DoorDash operational data — real-world datasets spanning logistics, merchant operations, consumer behavior, and marketplace dynamics, under appropriate data governance Research mentorship from senior researchers and engineering leaders at DoorDash, plus a named research sponsor for each fellow who meets with you weekly and is accountable for unblocking your work Speaker series featuring leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry — faculty from top ML programs, research leads from frontier AI labs, and senior operators from across tech. Fellows get dedicated 1:1 time with speakers when possible. A cohort of fellows working alongside you — a small, tight-knit group of researchers tackling different problems but sharing

About Scale AI Scale AI is the data foundation for AI, helping organizations build and deploy reliable production AI applications. We partner with leading enterprises and government organizations to accelerate their AI initiatives through our data annotation platform, generative AI solutions, and enterprise AI capabilities. Role Overview As a Senior Staff Frontier Agents Engineer on our Enterprise team, you'll be the technical bridge between Scale AI's cutting-edge AI capabilities and our most strategic customers. You'll work with enterprise clients to understand their unique challenges, architect custom AI solutions, and ensure successful deployment and adoption of AI systems in production environments. This is a hands-on technical role that combines deep engineering expertise with customer-facing problem solving. You'll work directly with customer engineering teams to integrate AI into their critical workflows. Key Responsibilities Customer Integration & Deployment Partner directly with enterprise customers to understand their technical infrastructure, data pipelines, and business requirements Design and implement custom integrations between Scale AI's platform and customer data environments (cloud platforms, data warehouses, internal APIs) Build robust data connectors and ETL pipelines to ingest, process, and prepare customer data for AI workflows Deploy and configure AI models and agents within customer security and compliance boundaries AI Agent Development Develop production-grade AI agents tailored to customer use cases across domains like customer support, data analysis, content generation, and workflow automation Architect multi-agent systems that orchestrate between different models, tools, and data sources Implement evaluation frameworks to measure agent performance and iterate toward business objectives Design human-in-the-loop workflows and feedback mechanisms for continuous agent improvement Prompt Engineering & Optimization Create sophisticate

Scale AI is the data foundation for AI, helping organizations build and deploy reliable production AI applications. We partner with leading enterprises and government organizations to accelerate their AI initiatives through our data annotation platform, generative AI solutions, and enterprise AI capabilities. About the General Agents Team The General Agents team, part of Scale’s Enterprise organization, builds robust general agents for customer use cases and applications. The team sits at the intersection of frontier agent development and real-world deployment, translating state-of-the-art reasoning and agentic capabilities into reliable, production-grade systems that drive real economic value. Our agents are scalable systems built around recurring enterprise problem domains, with a strong emphasis on generalization, extensibility, and deployment across many customers. About the Role As a Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) on the General Agents team, you’ll play a critical role in designing, building, and deploying production-ready AI agents that solve high-impact enterprise problems. You will work across the full agent lifecycle—from model and system design to evaluation, deployment, and iteration—bridging cutting-edge agentic techniques with the constraints and requirements of real customer environments. You will: Design and implement end-to-end agent systems that combine LLM reasoning, tool use, memory, and control logic to solve recurring enterprise use cases. Build scalable, reliable agent architectures that can be deployed across many customers with varying data, tools, and constraints. Develop evaluation frameworks, datasets, environments, and metrics to measure agent performance, reliability, and business impact in production settings. Collaborate closely with product managers, customers, data annotators, and other engineering teams to translate enterprise requirements into robust agent designs. Productionize frontier agent techniques (e.g.,