---
title: 'Applied Research - Forward-Deployed RL at Prime Intellect'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/applied-research-forward-deployed-rl-prime-intellect-san-francisco-mmv0489dtbvx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-26'
---

# Applied Research - Forward-Deployed RL at Prime Intellect

- **Company:** Prime Intellect
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-10-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-26
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/primeintellect/af2f419f-6596-4805-8e83-9cee5016aa1a

## Job description

Own Your Intelligence

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team.

Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own.

Prime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators — including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more. We are looking for people who want to build at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a category that does not fully exist yet.

## Role Impact

You will own applied RL programs from the first ambiguous customer problem through a deployed improvement loop. You will understand the workflow and business stakes, decide what can be measured and learned, build the environment and evaluation, run post-training experiments, deploy the result, and determine what should generalize into Prime's shared stack. The majority of your work will be organized around external programs. You will work directly with customer researchers, engineers, and leaders, and you will be accountable for both the research result and its practical impact.

## Responsibilities

Applied Research at Prime We turn a workflow into tasks, environments, evaluations, and reward signals, run post-training experiments against real baselines, and deploy what works. When a result looks good, we find out whether the gain came from the model or from the data, harness, inference, or infrastructure. The reusable parts become shared research, open-source systems, and product capabilities. Every Applied Research role is externally facing. Most researchers work directly with customers, users, or research partners while maintaining a substantive research agenda.

## Role scope

We have active programs across technology, science, engineering, regulated industries, and the public sector. Representative early problems

- Turn a partially documented workflow and business goal into an environment, baseline, and evaluation that the customer team agrees measures the right outcome.
- Improve a domain agent through RL or another post-training method while separating model limitations from task, harness, inference, and integration failures.
- Carry a successful experiment into deployment, measure its effect on the customer outcome, and convert the recurring parts into reusable environments, recipes, data loops, or platform capabilities.

## What you will own

- Technical and business discovery that produces a clear research plan, success measure, environment, and baseline.
- RL, distillation, and other post-training experiments tied to deployment outcomes.
- Agent systems that handle tool use, memory, recovery, long horizons, and human oversight.
- Deployment and adoption decisions, plus reusable artifacts carried back to Prime's research, engineering, and product teams.

## Requirements

- Relevant experience: customer-embedded technical work, research engineering, technical founding experience, applied ML consulting with real build ownership, or end-to-end post-training programs.
- You should be comfortable with senior external teams and able to connect experimental evidence to business decisions without lowering the research bar.
- Hands-on experience building and debugging model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation, or closely adjacent experimental loops.
- Strong experimental judgment: meaningful baselines, careful trace inspection, clear failure attribution, and a willingness to change direction when the evidence changes.
- Strong Python and the ability to build artifacts that other researchers and engineers can run, inspect, and extend.
- Comfort owning ambiguous problems and keeping partners and teammates current as you resolve them.

Evidence of exceptional work We value publications, open-source systems, benchmarks, and shipped products as evidence of exceptional work. Show us something difficult you built, what failed, and how the evidence changed your approach.

## Benefits and Perks

- Cash Compensation Range of $150-300k + equity incentives
- Flexible Work (San Francisco, New York, London, or remote)
- Visa Sponsorship & relocation support
- Professional Development budget
- Team Off-sites & conference attendance

If you're excited about the opportunity to build the foundation for the future of decentralized AI and create a platform that empowers developers and researchers to push the boundaries of what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.

## About Prime Intellect

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Prime Intellect provides an open, full-stack platform for companies to train, deploy, and continuously improve their own AI models through large-scale distributed reinforcement learning.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Vincent Weisser (CEO), Johannes Hagemann (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI infrastructure, open-source AI research, and agentic training platforms
- **Target customers**: B2B — enterprises and AI labs that want to train custom models without building their own infrastructure; also open-source community contributors
- **Mission**: Democratize frontier AI training by making it accessible to every company and collectively owning the resulting open innovations.

## Products & Services
- **Compute**: Access to GPU clusters (H100, H200, B200+) from 50+ providers, plus on-demand single GPU instances and reserved clusters with InfiniBand networking and SLURM/K8s orchestration.
- **Hosted Training (Lab)**: Managed large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) training without infrastructure overhead, including a 2,500+ environment hub and custom eval benchmarks.
- **Inference**: Serverless or dedicated inference for custom models, with native LoRA support and 1-click deployment.
- **Open-Source Libraries**: `prime-rl` (async RL framework), `verifiers` (environments & evals), and environment hub for collaborative development.
- **INTELLECT-3**: A 100B+ parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained on their RL stack, achieving state-of-the-art performance for its size.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Total Funding**: $70.44M across multiple rounds (CBInsights, 2026); earlier reports indicated $20.5M in seed rounds, followed by a Series B round of $49.94M led by Founders Fund and other investors.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Founders Fund, CoinFund, Distributed Global, Radical Ventures, Andrej Karpathy, Clem Delangue (Hugging Face), Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis), Tri Dao (Together AI).
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 128.6% YoY to 36 employees; 24 active job postings (monthly job growth +26.3%); launched INTELLECT-3 and SYNTHETIC-2 datasets; customers include Ramp and Zap; operates in 9 countries.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack integrated platform** – compute, post-training, evals, and inference in one place, reducing the fragmentation of building and maintaining AI workflows.
- **Large-scale distributed RL expertise** – proven ability to train 100B+ models across clusters (global training via their RL stack).
- **Open-source ethos** – models, datasets, and libraries are released openly, attracting a community of researchers and developers.
- **Founding team & research edge** – strong ties to frontier AI research, with contributions like prime-rl and self-improving agent loops.

## Strategic Focus
- **Self-improving agents** – building infrastructure that closes the loop from deployment back to training, enabling models to compound performance over time.
- **Scaling RL at extreme sizes** – recent research (RL at 1T Scale) shows commitment to massive-scale reinforcement learning.
- **Enterprise adoption** – adding dedicated solutions engineers and managed workflows for corporate customers.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Seeks “the most ambitious developers” and emphasizes cutting-edge research and engineering. The team includes former engineers from Together AI, Aleph Alpha, and Anyscale.
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Remote-friendly with HQ in San Francisco.
- **Growth trajectory**: Rapidly scaling company (headcount up 128% YoY) with multiple open roles across engineering, research, and go-to-market.
- **Tech stack**: Python, PyTorch, CUDA, Kubernetes, SLURM, Grafana, and a broad modern AI toolchain – opportunity to work on infrastructure-level challenges.

## Sources
1. [primeintellect.ai](https://www.primeintellect.ai/)
2. [linkedin.com/company/primeintellect-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/primeintellect-ai)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/PrimeIntellect](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/primeintellect)
4. [cbinsights.com/company/prime-intellect](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/prime-intellect)
5. [docs.primeintellect.ai/introduction](https://docs.primeintellect.ai/introduction)

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