Forward Deployed Research Engineer
HUD
Forward Deployed Research Engineer
HUD
AI agent evaluation platform and benchmarks
HUD's mission is to build reliable, fair and open infrastructure for AI data. We want data to be valuable for the people who create it and trustworthy for the labs that train on it. Our team is a quickly growing group of researchers, engineers and operators building the economy that shapes what AI will become. Backed by $16M from top VCs and YC (W25), our marketplace and platform are used by startups, Fortune 500 companies and frontier labs.
We’re looking for an Applied Research Engineer to own implementation. Our data buyers and sellers often have time-sensitive asks such as troubleshooting and running evals or cleaning data at scale. You’ll take the lead on diagnosing ambiguous technical problems and resolving them. This work is broad and hands-on - the right fit is a strong generalist AI engineer who can move quickly and wants to work closely with frontier AI labs and data vendors.
Own technical deployment requests from frontier AI labs, data vendors, and internal teams from triage to completion
Build RL environments and evals that satisfy the technical requirements and needs of frontier AI labs, sometimes under short timelines
Ask the right questions to clarify ambiguous asks and identify what actually needs to be done
Build tools and one-off pipelines to solve urgent customer or partner problems
Balance speed and quality in situations where customers need fast turnaround and the path is not fully specified
You may be a good fit if you have:
Experience building on benchmarks and evals - you can reason about what makes a task realistic, a rubric reliable, an environment usable, and a trajectory useful for RL training
Core engineering experience, preferably in a forward deployed or customer success context
Strong debugging instincts across code, data, and environments
Demonstrated ability to operate independently in ambiguous situations without a fully prescribed roadmap
Strong judgment about when to move fast, when to escalate, and when correctness or security requires extra care
Comfort working directly with technical customers, vendors, or cross-functional internal teams
Strong candidates may also have:
Experience in applied research engineering or forward-deployed engineering
Experience handling urgent production, customer, or deployment issues
Early-stage startup experience with ability to work independently in fast-paced environments
Strong communication skills for remote collaboration across time zones
We prioritize technical aptitude and learning potential over years of experience. Motivated candidates are encouraged to apply even if they don't meet all criteria.
Team Size: ~25 people currently, mostly full-time in-person, but some remote.
Our team: Our team brings together five International Olympiad medalists across IOI, ILO and IPhO, researchers published at NeurIPS and ICLR, and engineers and researchers from Google DeepMind, Amazon, AWS, Meta, Qwen, GLM, and Mercor. It also includes operators from BCG and Uber, the first security hire at one of the largest crypto exchanges, serial AI startup founders, former quant researchers, artists and the former #1 ranked Catan player in the world.
Company stage: We have 8 figures in funding and are scaling profitably and quickly to meet very strong demand.
Employment: Full-time.
Location: We have offices in San Francisco or Singapore but are open to remote candidates who can work hours that 70-80% overlap with either San Francisco or Singapore time zones.
Visa Sponsorship: We provide support for relocation and visas for strong full-time candidates to the US or Singapore.
Timeline: Applications are rolling. The process is 2 technical interviews and a 2-3 day work trial.
Competitive compensation
100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision (US and Singapore employees)
Lunch and dinner for in-office employees
Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays
401k with a 4% match
Other perks including an Equinox membership and commuter benefits (US employees) and a health/wellness stipend (Singapore employees)
Unlimited* access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc. *By unlimited, we mean no one on our token usage leaderboard has ever hit a limit. So we have no idea what the limit is.
Two top-floor offices in San Francisco’s Union Square and Singapore’s Raffles Place
Annual travel budget to visit either office
Actual offers are adjusted for experience and location, but our base salary bands are
San Francisco (and other major US cities): $105,000 - $180,000
Singapore: $100,000 - $135,000
Rest of world: $100,000 - $135,000
Due to high volume, we may not actively respond to every application, but feel free to contact us at [email protected] or elsewhere if we missed your application!
HUD provides an evaluation platform for AI agents that perform computer-use tasks. It offers an interface that connects to HUD evaluation environments, allowing users to run benchmarks across hundreds of environments and thousands of tasks. Users can integrate their agents using various adapters, and interact with the system through an asynchronous API for efficient experiments. The platform then collects telemetry and benchmarking results to inform agent improvements. HUD differentiates itself by concentrating on evaluating and improving knowledge-work agents across a wide range of tasks and environments, rather than just building models, and by enabling scalable, tool-enabled testing via adapters and an asynchronous workflow. The company’s goal is to help organizations and developers assess, compare, and enhance their AI agents so they perform better in real-world knowledge-work scenarios.
Explore more opportunities at HUD