San Francisco, United States
Research Scientist
Raydar · San Francisco · United States
- Salary
- $250,000–$500,000 per year
- Contract
- Full time
- Occupation
- Data Scientist
Posted: 10/1/2026 · Last checked: 10/28/2026
Job description
Quoted in full from Raydar's job posting. Gavroche does not edit it.
About the company
Our client is an artificial intelligence company.
The role
Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Lead applied machine learning research projects from initial idea through model training, testing and production rollout. Build the tooling that supports experimentation and contribute to the technical direction of a young research group.
What you'll do
- Fine-tune large language and multimodal models after pretraining, using reinforcement learning and related techniques.
- Investigate how autonomous software agents can stay effective on extended tasks, including planning, retaining context, recovering from errors and deferring to people at the right moments.
- Create simulated software environments, data generation pipelines and test suites used to train and measure agents.
- Develop approaches that let agents interpret and keep track of what users are trying to achieve across lengthy sessions.
- Plan careful experiments and choose the problems most worth pursuing.
- Move promising findings into production features.
- Contribute to setting research priorities and engineering direction for the group.
Requirements
What we're looking for
- Outstanding skill in both machine learning research and engineering.
- Deep expertise in at least one area such as model fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, agents, reasoning, memory and context handling, computer use, evaluation or human-agent interaction.
- Sound judgment in designing experiments and a habit of delivering complete working systems instead of one-off demos.
- Ability to shift smoothly between exploratory research, large training runs and production engineering.
- A track record of owning significant research work, for example a notable model, agent system, dataset, publication or open-source contribution.
- Self-driven, ambitious and at ease working on open-ended problems with no known answer.
- Roughly 3 to 6 years of research or engineering experience, with time at a leading AI lab valued.
Bonus points
- Direct experience with reinforcement learning for model fine-tuning, agents or long-running systems.
- A solid record of publications, open-source work or released benchmarks.
- Experience building training environments, data pipelines or test harnesses.
- Exceptional competitive achievement, such as in olympiads or quantitative fields.
Benefits
Compensation and benefits
- Base salary: USD 250,000 to 500,000 per year
- Equity
Location and work model
- San Francisco, CA, United States
- On-site, in office
- Full-time
From Gavroche data
Figures computed from live adverts on Gavroche; the job text above is the employer's.
Similar roles in San Francisco
- Machine Learning Engineer · Raydar, San Francisco
- Full Stack AI Engineer · Raydar, San Francisco
- Machine Learning Engineer · Raydar, San Francisco
- Research Scientist · Constellation, San Francisco
- Founding AI Engineer · Rockstar, San Francisco
- Senior Lead AI Engineer - G&A Systems · Klaviyo, San Francisco
200 open roles like this one; at most three per employer shown.
What data scientist adverts in the United States state
Middle half: 173,500 – 250,000 USD a year; median 209,000 USD.
From 367 adverts by 153 employers that state a salary, annualised.
How data scientist roles in the United States are worked
6% fully remote · 2% hybrid · 92% do not say
Of 164 adverts. An advert that does not state a work mode is counted as not saying, not as on-site.
New openings in San Francisco, by week
- 8/3/2026 143
- 8/10/2026 193
- 8/17/2026 211
- 8/24/2026 210
- 8/31/2026 295
- 9/7/2026 271
- 9/14/2026 332
- 9/21/2026 390
- 9/28/2026 472
- 10/5/2026 431
- 10/12/2026 515
- 10/19/2026 369
- 10/26/2026 203
4,035 openings over 12 weeks, by the week they were published.
Other roles at Raydar
- Tooling Engineer · Torrance
- Backend Software Engineer · San Francisco
- Backend Software Engineer · Alameda
- Backend Software Engineer · New York City
- Founding Software Engineer · San Francisco
- Staff Software Engineer - Biller Workflows · Mountain View
749 open, including roles outside the United States.