# Member of Technical Staff, Research at Abundant

- Company: Abundant
- What the company does: Environments and datasets for RL. Powering the world. Backed by Y Combinator.
- Company website: https://www.abundant.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: San Francisco
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $250K to $450K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-07-07
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/abundant/bd12575c-2eaf-4e34-aa8a-df632bacc51b
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/abundant-member-of-technical-staff-research/

## About the role

You will own a research agenda where research meets production, co-designing strategies with researchers from frontier AI labs. You are the “PM of the model”: you pick the problem, design the data and reward signal that moves it, and see it through to a live training run. The job rewards a founder mentality and extreme ownership, including going into unfamiliar domains, from chemical engineering to complex legal logic, and getting to ground truth fast on problems others have written off.

## What they're looking for

- You write a lot of code. Strong software engineering and deep Python, comfortable owning a system end to end and debugging through layers you did not write
- You have built evaluations, RL environments, agent harnesses, verifiers, or execution sandboxes, and you have opinions about which of them can be trusted
- You have shipped research into production, particularly post-training, distillation, and high-stakes evaluation
- You have worked on large-scale agent systems: orchestration frameworks, tool APIs, distributed execution, observability, and logging
- You get to ground truth in an unfamiliar domain by building something and reading outputs, not by reading about it
- You notice the misspecified task, the ambiguous prompt, and the grader that can be gamed

Tags: Engineering