# Software Engineer - RL Environments at AfterQuery

- Company: AfterQuery
- What the company does: AfterQuery captures how experts reason and turns real-world professional work into high-quality training data for frontier foundation models. Backed by Y Combinator.
- Company website: https://afterquery.com
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: San Francisco
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $260K to $290K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-04-14
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/afterquery/96bad96c-d7ad-4dca-9f9d-a8ae3e6f2794
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/afterquery-software-engineer-rl-environments/

## About the role

As a SWE (Environments), you will design the simulations, data, and evaluations that directly influence how frontier models learn. You'll work hands-on with research teams at top AI labs, experimenting with environment design, piloting novel data creation strategies, diagnosing model failure modes, and developing the metrics that determine whether a model is actually improving. You'll go from hypothesis to live experiment quickly, and your output will feed directly into model training runs at scale.

## What they're looking for

- Ability to design lightweight experiments, move fast, and extract actionable insights from messy results
- Experience with using Docker, or similar containerization tools, to design and monitor systems at scale
- Strong familiarity with common reinforcement learning algorithms and methods, especially with respect to post-training LLMs
- Major plus if they've worked for/interned for any RL environment companies in the past or any AI safety or benchmarking orgs like METR, Artificial Analysis, etc
- Former founders and early engineers at early stage startups are a plus. We want people who can demonstrate they work hard, learn fast, and care deeply about getting the details right

Tags: Engineering