Member of Technical Staff, Research Engineer

Job overview

The Member of Technical Staff, Research Engineer role is onsite in San Francisco, CA, with a stated compensation range of $200,000–$400,000 per year. Plato is an applied research lab building foundational infrastructure for training specialized AI agents. The engineer owns the empirical research and engineering loop for finding useful training targets: turning real-world traces and research hypotheses into realistic tasks, evaluating model behavior, and iterating systems that generate high-signal training data.

What you'll do

• Discover model failure modes from real-world traces, agent telemetry, researcher hypotheses, and customer workflows
• generate realistic curricula
• benchmark candidate tasks against frontier computer-use and agent models
• build loops to mutate, filter, and rescore tasks
• study reward hackability, task realism, long-horizon failures, and simulation-to-deployment transfer
• productionize research prototypes into reliable internal systems.

What we're looking for

Skills & competencies

research engineer

member of technical staff

san francisco ca

plato

full-time

onsite

ai research

reinforcement learning

llm agents

model evaluation

synthetic data

$200k–$400k per year

Work arrangement

• Weekend coverage required

Why this role

The role combines empirical AI research, systems engineering, and model evaluation, with ownership from hypothesis through implementation, evaluation, analysis, iteration, and productionalization.

About the employer

Plato is hiring for this role. Industry: Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Nanotechnology and Biotechnology). Sector: 54.