Founding Software Engineer
- On-site
- Full-time
- Lead
- Posted today
- Listed here until Dec 14, 2026
$200K to $350K a year as published by the employer
Applications are completed on the employer's own site.
Summary
Build and own the data, evaluation, and developer tooling infrastructure that supports research teams and partners in training frontier AI models.
About this role
Founding Software Engineer
San Mateo, CA·$200k – $350k + bonus + equity
Build the infrastructure that turns expert workflows into training data and evaluations for frontier models.
About Steadyworks
Steadyworks is a data research lab powering the next generation of AI. We partner with frontier AI labs to build expert-grade datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and evaluation infrastructure that improve state-of-the-art models. Our team previously built frontier AI systems at Meta, Google Research, Autodesk, and other leading organizations.
What you'll work on
You'll own the systems that let a small team ship expert-grade data at frontier-lab scale: the pipelines, developer tooling, and evaluation infrastructure that our researchers and partners rely on every day.
- Designing and building the data and evaluation platform end to end
- Scaling generation, review, and grading pipelines across many domains and modalities
- Building tooling that lets domain experts contribute high-quality tasks with minimal friction
- Creating internal apps for annotation, review, and RL environment authoring
- Standing up observability, storage, and orchestration for large-scale agent runs
- Partnering with research to ship new environment formats and eval methodologies
We're looking for someone who
- Has shipped production systems end to end: backend, data, and interfaces
- Cares about developer experience and the craft of a well-designed internal tool
- Thrives in ambiguous, fast-moving environments with significant ownership
- Is comfortable owning a system from prototype to sustained production use
Nice to have
- Experience with distributed systems, data pipelines, or ML infrastructure
- Experience building internal platforms or developer tools
- Familiarity with LLM agents, evaluation harnesses, or RL environments
- Contributions to open source
Why Steadyworks
As one of our first engineering hires, you'll set the technical foundation the rest of the team builds on. The systems you write will run every dataset, environment, and evaluation we ship to frontier labs. Former founders and technical leads who miss the zero-to-one phase are exactly the profile we're looking for.
How to apply
Email [email removed] with anything that would help us understand your work.
Skills named in this posting
- backend
- data
- interfaces
- distributed systems
- data pipelines
- ML infrastructure
- internal platforms
- developer tools
- LLM agents
- evaluation harnesses
- RL environments
- observability
and 2 more
About Steadyworks
Steadyworks is a data research lab powering the next generation of AI by building expert-grade datasets and evaluation infrastructure for frontier AI labs.
- Technology
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