Research Engineer, Benchmarks

About HUD

HUD https://www.hud.ai/ is building infrastructure to create RL training data and evals for frontier AI agents, as well as a marketplace to sell these to frontier labs through the HUD marketplace. Our platform is used by frontier labs, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. We’ve raised $16M from top VCs and were YC W25.

About THE Role

We’re looking for Research Engineers to build high-quality benchmarks for evaluating frontier agents on domain-specific tasks. You’ll build benchmarks that are technically rigorous, practically useful, and credible to frontier labs.

Responsibilities

• Own the design, implementation, and quality of HUD’s internal agent benchmarks

• Work with subject-matter experts to define tasks and create domain-specific benchmarks that evaluate agents on realistic workflows

• Build infrastructure to reliably run models and agents against benchmark tasks

• Develop metrics and analyses to understand benchmark difficulty, reliability, and failure modes

• Validate whether benchmark performance correlates with real-world evals, customer needs, and lab expectations

• Write clear documentation and benchmark reports that make results legible and credible to technical audiences

• EXPERIENCE

• You may be a good fit if you have:

• Proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments

• Published papers or written technical blogs on relevant topics such as public benchmarks and their limitations, model failure modes, etc. - please link in your application

• Strong understanding of what a “good benchmark” means and what makes one realistic, reliable, and useful

• Experience working on environments and evals

• Curiosity and ability to truly understand how workflows in various domains work

• Strong candidates may also:

• Be detail-oriented and able to spot subtle inconsistencies or edge cases in tasks

• Be able to reason from first principles about task design, scoring, and failure modes

• Thrive in unstructured problem spaces

• Early-stage startup experience with ability to work independently in fast-paced environments

• Strong communication skills for remote collaboration across time zones

• We prioritize technical aptitude and learning potential over years of experience. Motivated candidates are encouraged to apply even if they don't meet all criteria.

• TEAM & COMPANY DETAILS

• Team Size: ~15 people currently, mostly full-time in-person, but some remote.

• Our team: Our team includes 4 International Olympiad medalists (IOI, ILO, IPhO), serial AI startup founders, and researchers with publications at ICLR, NeurIPS, etc.

• Company stage: We have 8 figures in funding and high revenue growth. We’re scaling profitably and quickly to meet very strong demand.

• LOGISTICS

• Employment: Full-time.

• Location: On-site only, for now. You can join the team in the San Francisco Bay Area or Singapore offices.

• Visa Sponsorship: We provide support for relocation and visas for strong full-time candidates to the US or Singapore.

• Timeline: Applications are rolling. The process is 2 technical interviews and a 2-3 day work trial.

What WE Offer

• Competitive compensation

• 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision from Blue Shield of CA (US employees)

• Lunch and dinner when you’re in the office

• Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays

• Other perks including an Equinox membership, 401k, and commuter benefits (US employees)

• Unlimited* access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc. *By unlimited, we mean no one on our token usage leaderboard has ever hit a limit. So we have no idea what the limit is.

• Due to high volume, we may not actively respond to every application, but feel free to contact us at recruiting@hud.so or elsewhere if we missed your application!