Research Engineer (General)

About HUD

HUD 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

This is a general application for candidates who are unsure which research focus - QC Automation , Benchmarks , or Synthetic Data - they would be a fit for. We would love to meet you and figure it out together. However, if you already have a focus in mind, please apply to only that application .

We're looking for Research Engineers to build the technical foundation for training and evaluating frontier AI agents. You’ll build the systems for creating new environments, improve data quality, and translate real-world workflows into tasks and benchmarks.

Responsibilities

• Build systems for creating, running, evaluating, and improving agent training environments

• Design experiments to understand model behavior, agent failure modes, and data quality issues

• Develop tools that help researchers, engineers, and data vendors create higher-quality tasks, trajectories, and feedback loops

• Work across the full lifecycle of agent training data - task design, environment setup, trajectory collection, evaluation, and validation

• Partner with external vendors to identify bottlenecks and improve the quality and throughput of HUD’s data engine

• Build metrics and analyses that help us understand whether our tasks, environments, and evals are actually useful for training frontier agents

• Experience

• You may be a good fit if you have:

• Proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments

• Experience working on benchmarks and evals - you can reason about what makes a task realistic, a rubric reliable, an environment usable, and a trajectory useful for RL training

• Strong attention to detail and the ability to spot subtle inconsistencies in data, model behavior, or task design

• Experience building tools, pipelines, experiments, or infrastructure without a fully prescribed roadmap

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

• Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience building internal tools, research infrastructure, or data pipelines

• Experience designing metrics and validation workflows

• A background in competitive programming, Olympiad medaling, research, or unusually strong independent project experience

• Thrive in unstructured problem spaces

• 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 in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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

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

What we offer

• Competitive compensation based on experience and location

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

• 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

• 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 [[email removed]](mailto:[email removed]) or elsewhere if we missed your application!