Clera

Founding Reinforcement Learning Engineer

San Francisco
Salary
$125,000 - $200,000 annually
Level
Mid
Work type
On-site · San Francisco
Visa
Sponsors visas

Open. First seen 27 October 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

About the Role

Join an early-stage AI team building reinforcement learning systems from the ground up. You will own the end-to-end process, from environment design and model training to evaluation, helping shape the technical direction and engineering culture.

What You'll Do

  • Design and build reinforcement learning environments, reward functions, and training pipelines.
  • Train and fine-tune models using methods such as PPO, GRPO, DPO, RLHF, and RLAIF.
  • Develop evaluation frameworks to measure model and agent performance.
  • Run experiments, interpret results, and decide what to explore next.
  • Scale training on GPU clusters and keep training pipelines reliable.
  • Turn research ideas into production systems.
  • Help establish engineering practices and hire future team members.

What We're Looking For

  • At least 2 years of hands-on experience in reinforcement learning or machine learning engineering.
  • Strong Python skills and deep experience with PyTorch or JAX.
  • Practical experience training models with reinforcement learning methods, including policy gradients, reward modeling, or RLHF.
  • Experience with distributed training, GPU infrastructure, RL environments, reward functions, training pipelines, and model or agent evaluation.
  • A track record of taking research ideas into production systems.
  • A degree in computer science, mathematics, physics, or a related field; a master's or PhD is a plus.
  • LLM post-training or agent training experience is beneficial, as are RL publications or open-source work and experience with simulation frameworks or training libraries.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $125,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, United States. Candidates must be based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco.

What this role asks for

Particular to this role

PyTorch

Rare in Clera's other 299 open postings.

Standard for software engineering roles

Python

Common in software engineering postings at any company.

Compared with Clera's other open jobs.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 421 open in Engineering. 355 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in March: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.

WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS

Python (185 of 421), LLM (178 of 421), TypeScript (162 of 421), React (132 of 421), Machine Learning (109 of 421), PostgreSQL (76 of 421), JavaScript (70 of 421)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

From the team and dates on Clera's own job board.

Other openings for this role

2 postings for this role in San Francisco since 6 October 2026, 1 still open. None has been taken down and posted again.

  • 27 October 2026 – open (this posting)
  • 6 October 2026 – closed 27 October 2026

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