Senior Applied Research Engineer

What Youll Do:

The OpenPipe team at CoreWeave is building tools to help agents learn from experience. This is a critical step to make agents reliable enough to perform long tasks autonomously in the same way human employees are. Were systematically identifying and solving the major bottlenecks between todays tech and those future self-improving agents. So far weve:

• Released ART the easiest library for getting started with RL.
• Developed RULER a general-purpose reward function that works across many diverse tasks.
• Built Serverless RL an elegant API that gives RL practitioners full control over their data environment and reward function while letting them outsource the headaches of managing GPU infrastructure.

These releases have a theme: were systematically tackling each major roadblock to successfully training self-improving agents. Several serious challenges remain. Building simulated environments often requires substantial human labor and existing training methods are not data efficient enough. Were laser-focused on solving these problems and making self-improvement a reality for agent developers.

In startup terms this is a classic hard-tech bet. Our roadmap involves substantialtechnical risk; there are still major technical problems were facing without a proven solution. However there is very little market risk. Weve worked closely with the teams building agents at many of the top AI-native startups as well as large enterprises. If we can build this everyone will want it. A self improving agent that learns from experience the way a human employee would could quickly capture a large fraction of the total inference market which is worth tens of billions of dollars today and will be worth hundreds of billions in a few years.

About the role:

You have trained LLMs to be SOTA on specific tasks. You have opinions on whether sequence-level or token-level importance ratios are more effective. You probably shared the ScaleRL paper in your group chats and kicked off a few ablations after you read it.

This is an applied research role. You will be expected to generate and investigate research ideas towards solving the remaining obstacles tocontinuous learning in production. You will work with the broader OpenPipe team to validate these research directions across real customer tasks. We are very GPU rich and are ready to direct an enormous amount of compute at this effort.

Beyond your roles specific qualifications were looking for strong engineers with great taste. The most important qualification by far is that youlearn fast and can ship. This role will inevitably involve a lot of learning on the job; were building this airplane as we fly it. Engineers on our team touch everything from CUDA kernels to high-performance LLM tracing dashboards and you will have an opportunity to touch many parts of this stack. Although we operate as part of a larger company the OpenPipe team is small has a large degree of autonomy and drives our own roadmap and priorities. This is an excellent role for someone looking to found their own company in the future.

Who You Are:

• Bachelors Masters or PhD degree in Computer Science Machine Learning Robotics or a related technical field.
• 4 years of experience in machine learning or a PhD with 2 years of relevant industry experience with a strong focus on model training.
• Strong programming skills in Python and hands on experience with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Strong understanding of LLM post-training techniques including supervised fine-tuning reinforcement learning and on-policy distillation.
• Experience developing evaluating and deploying machine learning models in production environments.
• Strong research and problem solving skills with the ability to work effectively in ambiguous fast moving environments.

Preferred:

• Publications open source contributions or demonstrated research impact in LLM post-training or agent learning.
• Experience with distributed training GPU acceleration and large scale model training systems.
• Experience leading technically complex projects or mentoring other engineers.

Our Stack

We strive to use the best tool for the job when building and deploying our production services. Sometimes that means writing our own custom code and often it means leaning on the work of others. As part of building Serverless RL we depend on the following libraries and frameworks (among many others):

• Kubernetes
• Megatron
• Temporal
• Postgres
• FastAPI

Wondering if youre a good fit

We believe in investing in our people and value candidates who can bring their own diversified experiences to our teams even if you arent a 100% skill or experience match.

Why CoreWeave

We work hard have fun and move fast! Were in an exciting stage of hyper growth that you will not want to miss out on. Were not afraid of a little chaos and were constantly learning. Our team cares deeply about how we build our product and how we work together which is represented through our core values:

• Be Curious at Your Core
• Act Like an Owner
• Empower Employees
• Deliver Best-in-Class Client Experiences
• Achieve More Together

We support and encourage an entrepreneurial outlook and independent thinking. We foster an environment that encourages collaboration and provides the opportunity to develop innovative solutions to complex problems. As we get set for takeoff the growth opportunities within the organization are constantly expanding. You will be surrounded by some of the best talent in the industry who will want to learn from you too. Come join us!

The base salary range for this role is $182000 to $242000. The starting salary will be determined based on job-related knowledge skills experience and market location. We strive for both market alignment and internal equity when determining addition to base salary our total rewards package includes a discretionary bonus equity awards and a comprehensive benefits program (all based on eligibility).

What We Offer

The range weve posted represents the typical compensation range for this role. To determine actual compensation we review the market rate for each candidate which can include a variety of factors. These include qualifications experience interview performance and location.

In addition to a competitive salary we offer a variety of benefits to support your needs. The benefits below reflect our US-based offerings; for roles in other locations benefits vary and are shared during the hiring process. These include:

• Medical dental and vision insurance - 100% paid for by CoreWeave
• Company-paid Life Insurance
• Voluntary supplemental life insurance
• Short and long-term disability insurance
• Flexible Spending Account
• Health Savings Account
• Tuition Reimbursement
• Ability to Participate in Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
• Mental Wellness Benefits through Spring Health
• Family-Forming support provided by Carrot
• Paid Parental Leave
• Flexible full-service childcare support with Kinside
• 401(k) with a generous employer match
• Flexible PTO
• Catered lunch each day in our office and data center locations
• A casual work environment
• A work culture focused on innovative disruption

California Applicants

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Equal Opportunity & Accommodations

CoreWeave is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive workplace. All qualified applicants and candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex disability age sexual orientation gender identity national origin veteran status or genetic information.

As part of this commitment and consistent with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) CoreWeave will ensure that qualified applicants and candidates with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations for the hiring process unless such accommodation would cause an undue hardship. If reasonable accommodation is needed please contact: .

Export Control Compliance

This position requires access to export controlled information. To conform to U.S. Government export regulations applicable to that information applicant must either be (A) a U.S. person defined as a (i) U.S. citizen or national (ii) U.S. lawful permanent resident (green card holder) (iii) refugee under 8 U.S.C. 1157 or (iv) asylee under 8 U.S.C. 1158 (B) eligible to access the export controlled information without a required export authorization or (C) eligible and reasonably likely to obtain the required export authorization from the applicable U.S. government agency. CoreWeave may for legitimate business reasons decline to pursue any export licensing process.