Join a small, highly selective team to advance AI systems through post-training and alignment methods.
Posted by employer 1 month ago
First seen on Joblaze 1 day ago
Last verified on the company career page 1 day ago
Skills & Technologies
What you'll build
Must have
Nice to have
AI in the day-to-day
Building AI that can reason on real-world tasks and iterating on training recipes.
Not disclosed in this posting: compensation, years of experience, work arrangement, visa sponsorship.
Joblaze summary
In the role of Research Engineer, Post-Training, the individual will focus on refining AI agents by developing training recipes and evaluation methods that enhance model performance in real-world applications. Key skills include expertise in machine learning techniques such as RLHF and RLAIF, along with a strong foundation in statistics and systems-level thinking. This position is ideal for experienced professionals who thrive in fast-paced research environments and have a proven track record in advancing machine learning systems. Cognition's small, selective team emphasizes rapid deployment and innovation, providing ample resources for cutting-edge AI development.
Joblaze insights
Quick facts
From the original posting
Post-training is the critical bridge between raw model capability and a system that is actually useful, safe, and effective in the real world. You will shape how our agents learn by iterating on training recipes, evaluations, and alignment methods that directly determine what Devin and our future systems can do. This role blends deep research and hands-on engineering. We don't distinguish between the two.
Post-Training Recipe Development: Iterate on the full stack of datasets, training stages, and hyperparameters that determine model behavior. Measure how choices compound across evals and production performance, not just isolated benchmarks.
Evaluation Design and Integrity: Build evals that actually capture what matters. The loop never ends: define, optimize, realize the gaps, and rebuild. You'll be responsible for making numbers go up and making sure the numbers mean something.
Deep Understanding: When training produces results that don't make sense, you dig until you understand why. The goal isn't just to fix it; it's to carry that understanding forward to the next problem.
Alignment and Agent Behavior: Apply and advance techniques like RLHF, RLAIF, and constitutional approaches to shape how agents reason, act, and collaborate with humans in long-horizon tasks.
Scaling and Exploration: Measure how performance scales with data and compute, and develop new methodologies when existing ones hit ceilings. We expect both rigor and invention.
A track record of advancing ML systems through post-training, alignment, or related methods: RLHF, RLAIF, preference modeling, reward learning, or equivalent
Strong fundamentals in probability, statistics, and ML theory. The ability to look at experimental data and distinguish real effects from noise and bugs
Evidence of original contributions: publications at top venues, open-source impact, or equivalent industry results
Experience with large-scale distributed training and the debugging that comes with it
Systems-level thinking: not just model optimization, but understanding how training pipelines, data, and evaluation interact
Comfort with ambiguity and fast-moving research environments where priorities shift quickly
We care more about demonstrated capability than credentials. A PhD is one signal among many.
Small, highly selective team where research and product move together; prototypes reach real deployment quickly
Compute is not a constraint: large allocations with training jobs routinely running across thousands of GPUs from day one
The environment rewards speed, autonomy, and technical depth with minimal process overhead; this is one of the most competitive and fast-moving problems in AI
Everything needed to operate at frontier scale from day one.
Standard company text repeated across Cognition's postings is omitted here.
Explore more