Research Engineer, RL Environments

About Sherpa Labs

We build the RL environments and training data that frontier AI labs use to make their models better at real work. We’re a small team in San Francisco, backed by Y Combinator and angels from OpenAI, Google, Meta and Cognition.

• At the frontier of AI. You’ll work with researchers at the top AI labs, and the data you help build goes straight into the models they train.
• Big scope across a small team. There are only a few of us, so everyone owns real parts of the business and sees the impact of their work right away.
• In person, by design. We’re an in-person team in San Francisco. We believe the best work happens when we’re in the same room, and we’ve built our culture around that.
• Room to grow with us. We’re early, and the people who join now help decide how Sherpa Labs works and where it goes. As the company grows, so does your role.

About the role

You’ll build the environments and pipelines that frontier labs train and test their models on. The job is part research and part engineering: you’ll design tasks that hold up against the best models, build the infrastructure that runs them reliably and work directly with lab researchers on what their models need next.

What you’ll do

• Build RL environments that mirror real work in finance and software engineering.
• Run frontier models against our tasks and dig into where and why they fail.
• Build the human-built and synthetic data pipelines that turn raw data into training-ready tasks.
• Test and maintain our environments so they run the same way every time, at scale.
• Work directly with lab researchers to turn what their models need into concrete environments and tasks.

What we look for

• 2+ years of engineering experience, with strong Python and production systems.
• You’ve built evals or agents, or have a strong sense of what frontier models can and can’t do.
• You care whether a task actually measures what it claims to.
• You move fast and are comfortable with ambiguity.
• Low ego: you want direct feedback and act on it fast.

Benefits

• Competitive salary, meaningful equity and a performance bonus
• Top-tier health, dental and vision insurance
• All meals covered in person: breakfast, lunch and dinner
• Gym membership at Equinox or any gym you choose
• 401(k), HSA and FSA