Research Engineer / Performance Engineer, RL Distributed Systems

As a Research Engineer on our team, you will partner with Research Scientists to turn research ideas into working systems, building the data, tooling, and infrastructure that enable rapid iteration, trustworthy evaluation, and a smooth path from prototype to production. Building on our track record of AI-powered solutions (e.g., Bits AI , Bits Evolve , and our time series foundation model ), Datadog AI Research tackles high-risk, high-reward problems grounded in real-world challenges in cloud observability and security. We are focused on two research areas: World Models for Observability -- Training multimodal foundation models that learn the joint dynamics of distributed systems across metrics, traces, logs, topology, and events. These models power advanced forecasting, anomaly detection, root cause analysis, counterfactual simulation ("what if?"), and provide a learned planning backbone for our autonomous agents. Trained Agents for Observability -- Post-training models to operate autonomously across Datadog's domain. SRE incident response is our first target, with a clear path to code repair, security response, and infrastructure optimization. We build the simulation environments, RL training loops, and evaluation infrastructure needed to train agents that match or surpass frontier models at a fraction of the cost. What You'll Do: Build and operate multimodal data pipelines, training and evaluation infrastructure, benchmarks, and internal tooling Implement models, run experiments at scale, and profile for reliability, performance, and cost Build simulation environments and replay infrastructure for agent training and evaluation Orchestrate distributed training and distributed RL with Ray, including scheduling, scaling, and failure recovery Establish rigorous automated benchmarks and regression tests for world model predictions, agent performance, and simulation fidelity Collaborate with Research Scientists, Product, and Engineeri

About Anthropic Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems. About the role The RL Velocity team owns the efficiency and reliability of our RL Science stack - the infrastructure, tooling, and systems that let researchers iterate quickly on training runs. As a Research Engineer on the team, you'll build and improve the core platform that underpins how we do RL at Anthropic, removing bottlenecks that slow down research and making it easier for the broader org to ship better models faster. This is high-leverage work: small improvements to velocity compound across every researcher and every run. Responsibilities Build and improve the RL training infrastructure that researchers depend on day-to-day Identify and remove bottlenecks across the RL stack: debugging, profiling, and rearchitecting where needed Partner closely with researchers and with adjacent engineering teams (inference, sandboxing, and many more) to understand pain points and ship tooling that makes them faster Own the reliability and performance of research runs end-to-end Contribute to design decisions that shape how Anthropic does RL at scale You may be a good fit if you Have strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of building performant, reliable systems Have worked on ML infrastructure, distributed systems, or research tooling Care about enabling other people's work and find leverage through platforms rather than individual experiments Are comfortable operating across the stack, from low-level performance work to RL algorithms Have a bias toward shipping and iterating quickly, with a mix of high agency and low ego Strong candidates may also have Experience with large-scale distributed training (RL, pre-training,

About Appier Appier is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to power business decision-making. Founded in 2012 with a vision of democratizing AI, Appier's mission is turning AI into ROI by making software intelligent. Appier now has 17 offices across APAC, Europe and U.S., and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (Ticker number: 4180). Visit www.appier.com for more information. About the Role As a Research Scientist, you will work at the frontier of generative and agentic AI: advancing Large Language Models (LLMs) , Vision-Language Models (VLMs) , and AI agents that reason, plan, and use tools to solve real-world problems. Your research will span post-training (SFT, RLHF/RLVR), reasoning and test-time scaling, multimodal intelligence, and autonomous agentic systems. You will shape Appier's core AI capabilities, publish at top AI/ML conferences, and collaborate with scientists and engineers to turn frontier research into product impact. Responsibilities Research and build agentic AI systems : reasoning, planning, tool use, memory, and multi-agent collaboration, powered by LLMs and VLMs. Advance post-training techniques (SFT, RLHF, RL with verifiable rewards, preference optimization) to improve model capability, alignment, and reliability. Improve the performance, efficiency, and scalability of foundation models across training, inference, and test-time compute. Design rigorous evaluations and benchmarks for models and agents in real-world scenarios. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ship research into production applications. Track frontier research, propose new directions, and publish key findings at leading AI/ML venues. About You Minimum Qualifications Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, with research experience in AI/ML. Deep understanding of modern foundation models, with expertise in at least one of: LLMs, VLMs/multimodal models, RL, or agentic

About Appier Appier is an AI-native Agentic AI as a Service (AaaS) company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to power business decision-making. Founded in 2012 with a vision of democratizing AI, Appier’s mission is turning AI into ROI by making software intelligent. Appier now has 17 offices across APAC, Europe and U.S., and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (Ticker number: 4180). Visit www.appier.com for more information. About the Role As a Research Scientist, you will work at the frontier of generative and agentic AI: advancing Large Language Models (LLMs) , Vision-Language Models (VLMs) , and AI agents that reason, plan, and use tools to solve real-world problems. Your research will span post-training (SFT, RLHF/RLVR), reasoning and test-time scaling, multimodal intelligence, and autonomous agentic systems. You will shape Appier's core AI capabilities, publish at top AI/ML conferences, and collaborate with scientists and engineers to turn frontier research into product impact. Responsibilities Research and build agentic AI systems : reasoning, planning, tool use, memory, and multi-agent collaboration, powered by LLMs and VLMs. Advance post-training techniques (SFT, RLHF, RL with verifiable rewards, preference optimization) to improve model capability, alignment, and reliability. Improve the performance, efficiency, and scalability of foundation models across training, inference, and test-time compute. Design rigorous evaluations and benchmarks for models and agents in real-world scenarios. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ship research into production applications. Track frontier research, propose new directions, and publish key findings at leading AI/ML venues. About You Minimum Qualifications Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, with research experience in AI/ML. Deep understanding of modern foundation models, with expertise in at least one of: LLMs, VLMs/multimoda

About the Team OpenAI develops models that can reason through complex problems and hardware designed for the demands of advanced AI. AI for Chips connects these efforts: applying increasingly capable AI systems to the work of semiconductor engineering. Our goal is to help engineers develop better chips and shorten design cycles. This work brings research, model training, and hardware expertise together to build tools that engineers can use on real designs, with correctness and measurable performance at the center. About the Role We’re hiring a Research Engineer to help OpenAI models solve chip-design problems through reinforcement learning, tool use, and evaluation. You’ll own experiments from the initial idea through implementation and analysis. That means building environments and evaluations, running training, investigating failures, and using the results to decide what to try next. You’ll also build the software needed to make those experiments reliable and reproducible. We value strong coding fundamentals, careful experimental judgment, and the ability to make progress independently. Prior chip-design experience is helpful, but you can learn the domain alongside the team’s hardware specialists. In this role, you will: Build RL environments and evaluations for tasks such as RTL generation, design verification, and physical design optimization. Develop and test approaches that help models use chip-design tools and improve power, performance, and area while preserving correctness. Design experiments, establish baselines, and measure whether improvements hold up on new tasks and designs. Investigate failures across model behavior, rewards, evaluation tools, and experiment infrastructure. Improve iteration speed through better tooling, faster evaluations, and proxy rewards that reflect the outcomes we care about. Turn successful experiments into reusable research code and training workflows, working closely with researchers and engineers. You might thrive in this ro

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products. THE ROLE We’re looking for a customer-obsessed software engineer to come ship with us. You’ll own features like multi-node training and products like serverless reinforcement learning (RL) from conception to MVP (and from MVP to GA!). You’ll work through the stack, architecting solutions from API and UI down to our infrastructure layer. You’ll fine tune models yourself to develop an understanding of user workflows. You’ll work closely with research engineers leveraging state-of-the-art training techniques to build experiences that accelerate model development and solve for real pain points. If you’re excited to dive deep into the training, let’s talk! THE PRODUCT Take a look at what we’ve built so far: Overview of the product so far Training docs overview Story of the Training product Research we've done EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Checkpointing Pipeline: Our checkpointing pipeline starts with automated checkpointing, a feature that ensures that versions of models created during training are automatically backed up to the cloud. Users are able to then deploy checkpoints seamlessly into inference servers, providing point-and-click integrations into inference frameworks like vLLM and Baseten’s Inference Stack. This enables customers to quickly evaluate the performance of their checkpoints with real traffic. Multinode training: Multinode training enables customers to easily run training jobs across multiple compute nodes, enabling