Key Facts

Remote From:

Full time

English

Hard Skills

Reward Management Fractional Distillation Reward Management Data Synthesis Evaluation Strategy Controlled Experiments Production Engineering Dataset Reinforcement Learning Cross-Functional Collaboration Communication Sciences Stakeholder Communications Iterative And Incremental Development Scientific Reasoning

Other Skills

•
Teamwork

Roles & Responsibilities

Hands-on experience training LLMs with reinforcement learning, including GRPO or PPO beyond recipe-level reproduction, including group advantage computation, clipped objectives, and KL penalty design
Strong intuition for reward engineering: the ability to distinguish between a reward that trains effectively and one that will exploit at scale
Experience building multi-turn agent environments with tool use, not limited to single-turn question-answering setups
Comfort working across the full pipeline from dataset construction through training, evaluation, and deployment

Requirements:

Design and run post-training pipelines: SFT, GRPO, DPO, RLVR, reward function engineering, and synthetic data generation
Build task-specific training environments and evals tailored to customer domains like healthcare, code generation, and legal, spanning multi-turn tool use, sandboxed execution, and agentic workflows
Work directly with customers to translate production data into training signal, designing reward loops from real usage patterns and handling distribution shift
Run and analyze training experiments end-to-end: diagnose reward hacking, importance sampling drift, and advantage estimation instabilities

Baseten

About Baseten

At Baseten we provide all the infrastructure you need to deploy and serve ML models performantly, scalably, and cost-efficiently. Get started in minutes, and avoid getting tangled in complex deployment processes. You can deploy best-in-class open-source models and take advantage of optimized serving for your own models. We also utilize horizontally scalable services that take you from prototype to production, with light-speed inference on infra that autoscales with your traffic. Best in class doesn't mean breaking the bank. Run your models on the best infrastructure without running up costs by taking advantage of our scaled-to-zero feature.

Company type: Startup

Founded: 2018

Company size: 11 - 50

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Job description

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 $300M Series E, backed by investors including BOND, IVP, Spark Capital, Greylock, and Conviction. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products.

THE ROLE

This role sits at the applied end of our post-training research efforts. You will work directly with stakeholders from the world’s fastest-growing AI companies to post-train open-source models that outperform frontier closed models on their specialised tasks. Your day-to-day is finding creative ways to extract signal from complex, domain-specific datasets and building the reward functions, environments, eval harnesses, and training pipelines that turn that signal into better models. The models you train ship to production and reach millions of users.

We are looking for people with hands-on LLM fine-tuning and RL experience. Researchers who are excited by the prospect of shipping models into production, who can translate a customer's domain-specific requirements into an effective training curriculum, and who know when to be rigorous and when to iterate fast.

RECENT RESEARCH

RESPONSIBILITIES

Design and run post-training pipelines: SFT, GRPO, DPO, RLVR, reward function engineering, and synthetic data generation.
Build task-specific training environments and evals tailored to customer domains like healthcare, code generation, and legal, spanning multi-turn tool use, sandboxed execution, and agentic workflows.
Work directly with customers to translate production data into training signal, designing reward loops from real usage patterns and handling distribution shift.
Run and analyze training experiments end-to-end: diagnose reward hacking, importance sampling drift, and advantage estimation instabilities.
Publish findings at top venues and contribute to Baseten's open-source training libraries.

QUALIFICATIONS

Hands-on experience training LLMs with reinforcement learning — demonstrated understanding of GRPO or PPO beyond recipe-level reproduction, including group advantage computation, clipped objectives, and KL penalty design
Strong intuition for reward engineering: the ability to distinguish between a reward that trains effectively and one that will exploit at scale
Experience building multi-turn agent environments with tool use, not limited to single-turn question-answering setups
Comfort working across the full pipeline from dataset construction through training, evaluation, and deployment
Experience with production ML systems. Preference for candidates who have closed a training–inference loop where production data feeds back into model improvement

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

Experience with RL training frameworks
Publications at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, focused on RL for LLMs, reward modeling, or alignment

BENEFITS

Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
Generous PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
Paid parental leave
Company-facilitated 401(k)
Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you.

At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.

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