Job Overview
Job description
- Salary:
- USD 180,000 - 220,000 per year
- Location:
- United States
- Work arrangement:
- Remote
Role Summary
- Location: Remote (United States)
- Work Model: Remote
- Industry: Applied AI / AI research data
- Compensation: $180K-$220K base, ~$400K+ OTE (uncapped profit share)
As an RL Environment Software Engineer, you will sit at the intersection of research engineering and traditional software engineering, building the environments that simulate real-world workflows and the agents that automate them. This is forward-looking work, you will help research and predict what high-quality environments the frontier will need next, then build them from the ground up.
You will join a brand-new RL team being assembled with exceptional talent, with a clear path to grow alongside it as the function scales into industry pods.
Responsibilities
- Design and build high-quality RL environments that simulate real working environments end to end.
- Develop agents for the tasks within those environments and iterate until they are efficient and production-ready.
- Partner with the research team to scope which environments to build and why, staying ahead of future demand rather than only meeting present needs.
- Own the backend and infrastructure layers that make environments reliable and scalable.
- Help set engineering standards for a zero-to-one team as the RL function grows.
Requirements
- Strong machine-learning engineers who code heavily and build systems from scratch, with strong intuition for reinforcement learning.
- Proficiency across a modern stack, Node.js and Python on the backend and React/TypeScript on the frontend, with strong Kubernetes and Docker skills.
- Comfort operating in a fast-paced startup environment with high ownership and long hours.
- A track record of meaningful tenure and impact at previous companies.
- Reinforcement-learning experience or an RL research background is a strong plus, though not required.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
About the Company
Our partner is a fast-growing applied AI research lab that builds high-quality reinforcement-learning environments and agents sold to the world's leading AI labs. In under two years they have scaled to a nine-figure revenue run rate and grown their team severalfold in a matter of months, backed by leading venture investors. Quality is their core differentiator, and they are rapidly expanding into new domains.
- Role:
- RL Environment Software Engineer
- Job Type:
- Full Time
Company profile

talentpluto
talentpluto.comTalentPluto, run by Pluto, Inc., is a Y Combinator-backed startup building a hiring stack for high-growth companies. Its AI voice agent learns a person's career story in 10 minutes and makes them discoverable to employers and AI agents, its talent network places engineering, go-to-market and operations people at startups, and its AI recruiting tool supports candidate search and outreach.