Scale AI
Staff Software Engineer, RL Environments
San Francisco, CA; New York, NY · Staff+ · Full-time
Sponsorship not specified$252k-$315kDetected 4 days ago
TypeScriptPythonGoRustReactDistributed SystemsFull-Stack DevelopmentData StructuresAlgorithmsAWSGCPAzureDockerKubernetesLLMsResearchLeadershipCommunication
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
64Sponsors, lottery-bound
Cap-exempt (no lottery)0
Sponsors this role100
Entry-level history0
PERM / green-card track0
Lottery odds (Level IV)94
Fits your clock70
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
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Files H-1B transfers
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About the role
- An RL environment is a real piece of software: a containerized world with real dependencies, real state, real tools, and a grader that has to be correct even when the agent is creative about breaking it.
- You'll set technical direction across multiple teams, and you'll still be the person who writes the hard part.
Responsibilities
- As a Staff Software Engineer, RL Environments, you'll own the technical foundation for how Scale builds, runs, verifies, and delivers RL environments at scale.
- Building one is a full-stack engineering problem.
- Building thousands of them reproducibly, cheaply, with trustworthy reward signals and throughput measured in millions of rollouts is a systems problem that very few people have solved.
- You'll design the platform: sandboxed execution, environment packaging and versioning, rollout orchestration, trajectory capture, verifier frameworks, and the authoring surfaces that let engineers and domain experts produce environments without reinventing infrastructure each time.
- And you'll go deep on the environments themselves by instrumenting real applications, designing task suites that expose specific capability gaps, and building graders that hold up under adversarial optimization.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with strong fundamentals in distributed systems, system design, data structures, and algorithms.
- Strong Python skills and a track record of shipping production software
- Deep experience with containerization and sandboxed execution, including Docker, VMs, gVisor/Firecracker, Kubernetes, or equivalent.
Nice to have
- RL & Post-Training
- Familiarity with post-training methods: RLHF, RLAIF, RLVR, GRPO/PPO-family algorithms, rejection sampling, reward modeling, and the practical failure modes of each.
- Experience designing verifiable reward signals, and firsthand experience with reward hacking and how to defend against it.
- Experience with RL training or serving stacks (verl, TRL, Ray, vLLM, SGLang, or similar).
- Systems & Infrastructure
- Experience with cloud-native infrastructure across AWS/GCP/Azure, Infrastructure as Code, and CI/CD.
- Strong observability instincts: tracing, structured logging, and metrics for systems whose failure modes are statistical rather than binary.
- Experience in a research-adjacent engineering role, translating research goals into production systems.
Skills
- About Scale AI
- Scale Frontier Data is the organization behind the training and evaluation data that frontier labs depend on.
- Reinforcement learning environments are now the center of gravity for that work:
Compensation
- packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits.
- Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval.
- Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant.
- $252,000 - $315,000 USD
Benefits
- comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO.
- Additionally, this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.
Company info
- At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.
- We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.
- We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.com. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.
- We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision.
- We collect, retain and use personal data for our professional business purposes, including notifying you of job opportunities that may be of interest and sharing with our affiliates.
- We limit the personal data we collect to that which we believe is appropriate and necessary to manage applicants' needs, provide our services, and comply with applicable laws.
- At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions.
- Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact.
- We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force.
- We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.
- We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace.
- We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.
- We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities.
- If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.com.
Visa & Work Authorization
- al employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status
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This listing is sourced directly from Scale AI's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.