Staff Research Engineer, Frontier Data
Turing· startup· AI/ML· Sep 24, 2026 · 1mo ago
United States
Full-time
Staff
$250K–$400K
Job description
About Turing
Turing’s mission is to accelerate superintelligence to drive real economic progress. Headquartered in San Francisco, Turing works with frontier AI labs to generate high-quality datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and frontier research benchmarks that improve model capabilities in software engineering, enterprise knowledge work, and advanced STEM reasoning. In software engineering, Turing is the largest and longest-running data provider in the category. Turing also works with Fortune 500 enterprises across financial services, life sciences, healthcare, retail, automotive, and CPG to build and deploy end-to-end agentic AI systems inside mission-critical workflows. By operating on both sides, Turing closes the loop between frontier research and enterprise deployment, turning real-world deployment signals into better data, evaluations, and more capable models. Learn more at www.turing.com .
The Role
Turing builds large-scale datasets and reinforcement learning (RL) environments that power post-training for the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises. We create RL environments to evaluate and improve our customers' models on complex, long-range, multi-step workflows across high-GDP-value domains such as Finance, Sales, Retail, Developer Tools, Collaboration, Customer Experience.
The environments vary depending on the model capability being evaluated / improved, a few examples of environment types are listed here:
Environments for Software Engineering / coding agents
UI-Environments for Computer-Use/Browser-Use agents
MCP-based Environments for general function-calling agents across various enterprise and consumer applications
We are seeking Research Engineers to advance our understanding of frontier AI systems and develop practical innovations in data, algorithms, evaluation, and training.
You will work at the intersection of research and engineering, investigating high-impact questions that improve real-world AI systems. You will design and run rigorous experiments, develop research-grade prototypes and tooling, and collaborate with Research, Engineering, Product, and Operations teams to translate promising ideas into scalable applications.
This role offers the opportunity to contribute to both foundational research and applied AI development across synthetic and agentic data generation, reinforcement learning, post-training, model understanding, benchmarks, and evaluation.
What You’ll Do
1. Conduct Research on Frontier AI Systems
Investigate the capabilities, limitations, and training methods of frontier AI systems.
Formulate research questions that can inform Turing’s products, platforms, and technical strategy.
Explore new approaches to synthetic and agentic data generation, reinforcement learning, post-training, model understanding, benchmarks, and evaluation.
Stay current with advances in machine learning and identify opportunities for meaningful technical contribution.
2. Build and Evaluate Research Systems
Develop research-grade datasets, experiments, prototypes, tooling, and evaluation frameworks.
Train, test, and evaluate models using modern AI and machine learning tools.
Analyze results carefully and draw clear, evidence-based conclusions.
Establish sound practices for experimental rigor, data quality, reproducibility, and interpretation.
Iterate quickly from early hypothesis through validated technical insight.
3. Translate Research into Practical Impact
Collaborate closely with Research, Engineering, Product, and Operations teams.
Translate research findings into improvements for Turing’s products, platforms, and AI capabilities.
Help identify which ideas are ready to move from exploration into scalable, real-world applications.
Communicate technical findings clearly to both specialized and cross-functional audiences.
4. Contribute to the Research Community
Share findings through technical reports, publications, open-source work, workshops, or conference participation where appropriate.
Contribute to Turing’s research culture through technical discussions, peer review, mentorship, and collaboration.
Represent Turing thoughtfully within the broader AI research community.
What We’re Looking For
Research background: PhD or Master’s degree in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer science, or a closely related technical field; exceptional equivalent research experience will also be considered.
Technical depth: Strong foundation in machine learning and practical experience designing experiments, training or evaluating models, and working with modern AI tooling.
Relevant expertise: Demonstrated research experience in synthetic or agentic data generation, reinforcement learning or post-training, AI understanding, evaluation, or benchmarks.
Research engineering ability: Strong programming skills and the ability to implement, test, and iterate quickly in a research environment.
Scientific judgment: Sound judgment around experimental rigor, data quality, reproducibility, and evidence-based decision-making.
Communication and collaboration: Clear written and verbal communication skills, intellectual curiosity, and the ability to work effectively across research and engineering teams.
A note from our CTO, Ece Kamar
Some of the most important questions in AI can't be answered from inside a single lab: how to evaluate frontier models, how data and RL truly drive capability, and what happens when AI meets the real world. At Turing, we work directly with frontier labs, the academic community, and enterprises deploying AI at scale. That creates a feedback loop where deployment shapes our research and our research shapes the field, and we publish our findings, datasets, and benchmarks openly. Join our talented team at Turing to push the frontier of AI with rigorous science that matters.
Why Turing
Work directly with leading AI labs and enterprises at the frontier of post-training and RL environment design.
Build datasets and environments that directly improve the capabilities of advanced AI systems.
Help advance coding agents’ ability to understand, plan, and execute complex software-engineering tasks.
Apply frontier AI innovations to high-value enterprise workflows.
Operate with high autonomy, rapid iteration, and meaningful commercial impact.
Collaborate with exceptional colleagues from organizations including Google, Meta, Amazon, and other leading technology companies.
Contribute to research that may be shared through technical publications and leading conferences such as ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS.
Compensation: $250,000 to $400,000 OTE + Equity Values
We are client first: We put our clients at the center of everything we do, because their success is the ultimate measure of our value.
We work at Start-Up Speed: We move fast, stay agile and favor action because momentum is the foundation of perfection
We are AI forward: We help our clients build the future of Al and implement it in our own roles and workflow to amplify productivity.
Advantages of joining Turing
Work at the frontier of AI , helping the world’s leading AI labs improve their most advanced models by building expert datasets, RL environments, and first-of-a-kind benchmarks.
Contribute to leading-edge AI research and showcase your work at top conferences such as ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS.
Bring frontier AI innovation to the enterprise , applying lessons learned from leading AI labs to solve real-world business challenges.
Collaborate with and learn from exceptional colleagues with deep AI experience from Google, Meta, Amazon, and other leading technology companies.
Move at the pace of AI innovation , with the speed, ownership, and impact of a startup.
Turing is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics. At Turing we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace and celebrate authenticity, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
For applicants from the European Union, please review Turing's GDPR notice here .
Application prep
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