Staff ML Engineer, Agent Training & Environments

Labelbox


Job Location:

San Francisco, CA - USA

Monthly Salary: $ 250000 - 280000
Posted on: 21 hours ago
Vacancies: 1 Vacancy

Job Summary

Shape the Future of AI

At Labelbox were building the critical infrastructure that powers breakthrough AI models at leading research labs and enterprises. Since 2018 weve been pioneering data-centric approaches that are fundamental to AI development and our work becomes even more essential as AI capabilities expand exponentially.

About Labelbox

Were the only company offering three integrated solutions for frontier AI development:

  1. Enterprise Platform & Tools: Advanced annotation tools workflow automation and quality control systems that enable teams to produce high-quality training data at scale
  2. Frontier Data Labeling Service: Specialized data labeling through Alignerr leveraging subject matter experts for next-generation AI models
  3. Expert Marketplace: Connecting AI teams with highly skilled annotators and domain experts for flexible scaling

Why Join Us

  • High-Impact Environment: We operate like an early-stage startup focusing on impact over process. Youll take on expanded responsibilities quickly with career growth directly tied to your contributions.
  • Technical Excellence: Work at the cutting edge of AI development collaborating with industry leaders and shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
  • Innovation at Speed: We celebrate those who take ownership move fast and deliver impact. Our environment rewards high agency and rapid execution.
  • Continuous Growth: Every role requires continuous learning and evolution. Youll be surrounded by curious minds solving complex problems at the frontier of AI.
  • Clear Ownership: Youll know exactly what youre responsible for and have the autonomy to execute. We empower people to drive results through clear ownership and metrics.

Role Overview

Labelbox is the RL data factory for advancing frontier agent capabilities. We build the data environments and evaluations that frontier labs use to train and judge their agents.

This role sits where training meets infrastructure. You will run the experiments and build the systems that run them: environments agents act in verifiers that decide whether they succeeded and the fine-tuning pipelines that turn that signal into a better model. Were looking for someone who does both halves the engineering throughput of a strong platform engineer and real depth in post-training agents.

The bar is high: engineers with strong judgment who set technical direction turn prototypes into reliable systems fast and are at the frontier of agent-first engineering practice.

What youll work on

  • RL environments for agentic tasks: task definitions tool surfaces state and reset semantics reward design and the harness that runs thousands of them in parallel.
  • Verifiers and graders: programmatic checks LLM judges rubric pipelines scoring. Deciding what the agent succeeded means and making that judgment trustworthy at scale.
  • Fine-tuning pipelines that turn evaluation signals into measurable agent improvements SFT and RL from data collection through training to checkpoint evaluation.
  • Eval systems that run millions of agent trajectories to measure model and product quality.
  • Training and serving infrastructure that scales to the throughput frontier labs need: multi-launcher orchestration long-running job fault tolerance cost accounting.

What were looking for

As an engineer

  • A 3 year track record of shipping systems that customers and other engineers still rely on.
  • Exceptional throughput without the quality tax. You ship a lot you review a lot and the v1 you ship becomes the foundation the rest of the team builds on.
  • Strong system and API design judgment. Hard architecture calls land with you: you make them defend them under pressure and update fast when someone else is right.
  • You ship production code with coding agents daily. You know where they break and what it takes to make them reliable and you use that to move the whole team faster.
  • You build the substrate other peoples work runs on tooling CI harnesses libraries and you treat that as the job not a distraction from it.
  • You move fast in ambiguous startup-pace environments with influence over authority.
  • Deep proficiency in Python and comfort across the rest of the stack.

As an RL post-training practitioner

  • You have fine-tuned models for agentic tasks and made them measurably better. SFT plus at least one RL method (GRPO PPO DPO or similar) in production.
  • You have built environments agents operate in and you know why reward and task design is where most of the difficulty actually lives.
  • You have designed verifiers or graders for open-ended work and you know how they get gamed.
  • You debug training runs forensically and methodically.
  • You reason about compute-economics. You know what an experiment costs when a run is not worth finishing and how to get the same signal for a tenth of the spend.
  • You write up what you learned so it changes what the team does next.

Nice to have

  • Experience with agent harnesses and coding agents as subjects of training and evaluation.
  • Multi-tenancy and isolation for untrusted agent execution: sandboxing egress control credential handling.
  • Background in production distributed systems ML infrastructure or data systems at scale.
  • Experience working directly with frontier labs or other highly technical customers.

Our Technology Stack

Our engineering team works with a modern tech stack designed for scalability performance and developer efficiency:

  • Frontend: with Redux TypeScript
  • Backend: TypeScript Python some Java & Kotlin
  • APIs: GraphQL
  • Cloud & Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Kubernetes
  • Databases: MySQL Spanner PostgreSQL
  • Queueing / Streaming: Kafka PubSub

Labelbox strives to ensure pay parity across the organization and discuss compensation transparently. The expected annual base salary range for United States-based candidatesis below. This range is not inclusive of any potential equity packages or additional benefits. Exact compensation varies based on a variety of factors including skills and competencies experience and geographical location.

Annual base salary range

$250000 - $280000 USD

Life at Labelbox

  • Location: Join our dedicated tech hub in San Francisco
  • Work Style: Hybrid model with 3 days per week in office combining collaboration and flexibility
  • Environment: Fast-paced and high-intensity perfect for ambitious individuals who thrive on ownership and quick decision-making
  • Growth: Career advancement opportunities directly tied to your impact
  • Vision: Be part of building the foundation for humanitys most transformative technology

Our Vision

We believe data will remain crucial in achieving artificial general intelligence. As AI models become more sophisticated the need for high-quality specialized training data will only grow. Join us in developing new products and services that enable the next generation of AI breakthroughs.

Labelbox is backed by leading investors including SoftBank Andreessen Horowitz B Capital Gradient Ventures Databricks Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading AI labs.

Your Personal Data Privacy: Any personal information you provide Labelbox as a part of your application will be processed in accordance with Labelboxs Job Applicant Privacy notice.

Any emails from Labelbox team members will originate from a @ email address. If you encounter anything that raises suspicions during your interactions we encourage you to exercise caution and suspend or discontinue communications.


Required Experience:

Staff IC

Shape the Future of AIAt Labelbox were building the critical infrastructure that powers breakthrough AI models at leading research labs and enterprises. Since 2018 weve been pioneering data-centric approaches that are fundamental to AI development and our work becomes even more essential as AI capab...

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