Skip to main content

Senior Research Engineer, Frontier Data

Turing.comResearchOperations
Work mode
On-site
Full Time
Education
Master's or PhD

Palo Alto, CA at a glance

Rent
#2 of 51
$3,050/mo+46% vs US avg
Weather
#17 of 51
292 mild days0 hot · 0 cold
Income tax
#1 of 51
13.3% top rateCalifornia

What you need

  • PhD or Master's in AI/ML/CS or equivalent research experience
  • Strong ML foundation with experiment design, model training/evaluation experience
  • Research experience in synthetic/agentic data, RL/post-training, AI evaluation
  • Strong programming skills for rapid research prototyping and iteration
  • Sound judgment on experimental rigor, data quality, reproducibility

What you'll do

  • Conduct research on frontier AI systems capabilities and training methods
  • Build and evaluate research systems: datasets, experiments, prototypes, tooling
  • Translate research findings into product improvements and scalable applications
  • Publish and present research at top conferences (ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS)
  • Collaborate across Research, Engineering, Product, and Operations teams

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: 

  1. Environments for Software Engineering / coding agents 
  2. UI-Environments for Computer-Use/Browser-Use agents 
  3. MCP-based Environments for general function-calling agents across various enterprise and consumer applications

We are seeking Senior 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.

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.

This role is required to be in office five days a week, based in any of Turing's offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, or Seattle.

Compensation: $250,000 to $350,000 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.


Optimize your resume for this job

Get a match score and the keywords you're missing

Optimize resume

About Turing.com

Turing is one of the world’s fastest-growing AI companies accelerating the advancement and deployment of powerful AI systems. Turing helps customers in two ways: Working with the world’s leading AI labs to advance frontier model capabilities in thinking, reasoning, coding, agentic behavior, multimodality, multilinguality, STEM and frontier knowledge; and leveraging that work to build real-world AI systems that solve mission-critical priorities for companies. Powering this growth is Turing’s talent cloud—an AI-vetted pool of 4M+ software engineers, data scientists, and STEM experts who can train models and build AI applications. All of this is orchestrated by ALAN—our AI-powered platform for matching and managing talent, and generating high-quality human and synthetic data to improve model performance. ALAN also accelerates workflows for model and agent evals, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, reinforcement learning with human feedback, preference-pair generation, benchmarking, data capture for pre-training, post-training, and building AI applications. Turing—based in San Francisco, California—was named #1 on The Information’s annual list of “Top 50 Most Promising B2B Companies,” and has been profiled by Fast Company, TechCrunch, Reuters, Semafor, VentureBeat, Entrepreneur, CNBC, Forbes, and many others. Turing’s leadership team includes AI technologists from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, X, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT.

Similar Research roles

Senior Research Engineer, Frontier Data
Turing.com
Apply