Research Engineer

San Francisco, California • $200K-320K + Equity

Overview

We believe the next breakthrough in AI-assisted development will come from agents that continuously learn and adapt. Today's coding assistants are static - we're building systems that improve through interaction with real developers and codebases.

As a Research Engineer at OpenBlock Labs, you'll develop novel approaches to reinforcement learning and continual learning in the context of software development. Your work will enable our agents to learn from developer feedback, adapt to new codebases, and continuously improve their capabilities through real-world deployment.

Key research challenges

• Developing reinforcement learning frameworks tailored to software engineering tasks

• Creating robust reward models that capture code quality, correctness, and developer preferences

• Building evaluation environments that accurately reflect production software development

• Implementing continual learning systems that avoid catastrophic forgetting

• Designing curriculum learning approaches for complex, multi-step coding tasks

• Establishing metrics that measure genuine improvements in coding capability

You may be a good fit if you

• Have deep expertise in reinforcement learning and its applications to complex domains

• Are experienced with RLHF, reward modeling, and preference learning

• Can translate abstract objectives into concrete, learnable reward functions

• Have built and deployed continual learning systems in production

• Understand the engineering challenges of scaling ML systems

• Are passionate about the intersection of AI and software engineering

• Value both theoretical rigor and practical impact

Technical qualifications

• Strong background in reinforcement learning, including modern algorithms and techniques

• Experience with large-scale distributed training and optimizat

• Proficiency in PyTorch, JAX, or similar ML frameworks

• Track record of research contributions through publications or deployed systems

• Ability to design and conduct rigorous experiments and evaluations

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or related field (or equivalent experience)

What we offer

• Competitive compensation: $200,000 - $320,000 base salary plus significant equity

• Opportunity to work on fundamental research with immediate real-world applications

• Direct impact on products used by thousands of developers daily

• Freedom to explore novel approaches and push the boundaries of what's possible

• Access to substantial compute resources for experimentation and training

• Collaboration with a talented team of researchers and engineers