Preference Model

Preference Model

Member of Technical Staff - Software Engineering Capabilities

San Francisco · Staff+

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 6 days ago
Distributed SystemsMachine Learning

About the role

  • You will work on frontier AI from day one.
  • There is no permission to ask for and no queue to wait in.
  • This is independent, high-ownership work with regular feedback.

Responsibilities

  • Hunt for where frontier models break across software, and build the hard, high-fidelity scenarios that expose those failures and push the ceiling of what the best models can do.
  • Own the hardest problems on the roadmap end to end: multi-step workflows, realistic stakeholder interactions, large codebases with real conventions and technical debt, and challenging system design.
  • Build verification robust enough that a frontier model can't hack it, and tell genuine capability gaps apart from artifacts of your own setup.
  • Build the tooling your own work depends on.
  • Visa sponsorship & relocation support available

Requirements

  • Deep software engineering experience across multiple domains, with genuine expertise in at least one specialty: infrastructure, distributed systems, performance, security, compilers, databases, or similar.
  • Proficiency in Python.
  • Extensive hands-on experience with coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar), including an intuition for where they cut corners and how to direct them well.
  • Strong intuition for how models behave, even without prior ML or AI experience.
  • Comfort working independently on complex, ambiguous problems with minimal direction.
  • Track record of owning work end-to-end in previous roles.
  • You have been a senior or staff software engineer at a company known for engineering rigor (e.g., a frontier lab, infrastructure startup, or systems-heavy team) and want to apply that experience to model training.
  • You have been an early engineer at a previous startup, shipped independently, and want to do it again in AI.

Nice to have

  • Opportunity to work alongside senior and staff engineers from frontier labs and infrastructure companies, plus top ML engineers

Compensation

  • Competitive cash and equity compensation (>90th percentile)

Benefits

  • Competitive cash and equity compensation (>90th percentile)
  • Health, vision, dental, benefits

Company info

  • Preference Model is automating ML engineering and a critical component is models' abilities to develop software.
  • The way we build software is changing fast. Five years ago we wrote every line of code by hand. Today, we don't. What does our work look like five years from now? We are shaping this future.
  • Recent models work well on narrow tasks but are still brittle on real software work: large codebases with real conventions and technical debt, judgment-heavy design decisions, and multi-step problems. The bottleneck on fixing that is the supply of hard, high-fidelity scenarios that find where the best models still break. That is what we build.
  • Our founding team has previous experience on Anthropic's data team building data infrastructure, and datasets behind Claude. We are partnering with leading AI labs to push AI closer to achieving its transformative potential.
  • The way we build software is changing fast.
  • Five years ago we wrote every line of code by hand.
  • Today, we don't.
  • What does our work look like five years from now?
  • We are shaping this future.
  • Recent models work well on narrow tasks but are still brittle on real software work: large codebases with real conventions and technical debt, judgment-heavy design decisions, and multi-step problems.
  • The bottleneck on fixing that is the supply of hard, high-fidelity scenarios that find where the best models still break.
  • That is what we build.
  • Our founding team has previous experience on Anthropic's data team building data infrastructure, and datasets behind Claude.
  • We are partnering with leading AI labs to push AI closer to achieving its transformative potential.

Visa & Work Authorization

  • Visa sponsorship & relocation support available
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This listing is sourced directly from Preference Model's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.