---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff - Research at Polymath'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-research-polymath-san-francisco-47ynw3cs013e'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Member of Technical Staff - Research at Polymath

- **Company:** Polymath
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $150k–$300k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-04-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polymath/02503610-2a98-4760-9003-4177cf884c20

## Job description

## About Polymath

Polymath is an applied research lab focused on advancing long-horizon agent capabilities through reinforcement learning. We design and scale simulation environments where agents learn to operate safely and autonomously. We work with the world’s leading model labs to push the frontier of agent capabilities. We've raised >$8M from Base10, Cervin Ventures, Founders Future, Y Combinator, and other incredible investors & angels.

## About the role

We’re hiring a Founding Member of Technical Staff - Research to help advance the frontier of autonomous agents. You’ll work on core research problems in long-horizon evaluation, agent post-training, and environment design, with a focus on understanding where current models fail and how to improve them. As a member of the founding team, you should expect to wear multiple hats: building benchmarks, creating environments, writing production code, and running rigorous experiments. We’re looking for people who are excited by hard open-ended problems and want to operate at the intersection of research and engineering. Examples of projects you could work on include:

- Investigating failure modes of frontier models
- Creating rigorous benchmarks that evaluate how well frontier agents perform on complex, realistic tasks requiring long-horizon reasoning and tool use in dynamic environments
- Post-training agents that can reason, plan, and act over extended time horizons
- Publishing research

You’ll be a good fit if you:

- Have strong engineering & research fundamentals and are a prolific user of AI tools
- Have experience post-training frontier models
- Have experience shipping reliable, production-quality code
- Have a track record of publications

Perks:

- 🪷 Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
- 🍽 Free meals with the team
- 🧘 Free Bay Club membership (right next door to our Embarcadero office!)
- 🚞 Commuter benefits
- 🏦 401(k)
- 🌎 Unlimited PTO
- 💻 Top of the line tech
- 🌁 Frequent team activities and outings

Culture:

- Polymath is a team of researchers, engineers, and operators focused on advancing the frontier of safe, superintelligent AI agents.
- We have a flat organizational structure. We believe that people do their best work when they’re self-motivated and driven by a desire to learn, contribute to the team’s goals, and advance scientific progress.
- We’re looking for folks who ship fast, set high standards for themselves, and are great team players. You’ll be a member of our founding team: have fun, learn a lot, and do high-impact work alongside great people.

## About Polymath

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Polymath is an applied research lab that builds simulation environments where AI agents learn to operate autonomously over long horizons through reinforcement learning.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Startup) – Seed stage, Y Combinator W26 batch.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States.
- **Founded**: 2026.
- **Founders**: Dylan Ma (CEO) and Naren Yenuganti (CTO).

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Artificial Intelligence / AI Research – specifically focused on agentic AI, reinforcement learning, and simulation environments.
- **Target Customers**: B2B – primarily the world’s leading frontier model labs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind) that need advanced training and evaluation environments for autonomous agents.
- **Mission or Purpose Statement**: “Increasing the reliability and autonomy of AI agents to better serve people” – building simulated worlds where agents can practice and learn through experience, aiming for a future where agents perform useful work over days/weeks with little or no human supervision.

## Products & Services
- **Horizon-SWE Benchmark**: A benchmark that evaluates AI agents on end-to-end software engineering workflows (planning, coding, testing, deployment, monitoring) inside a simulated software company. Leading models score around 25% on this benchmark.
- **Simulation Environments**: Custom-built simulated worlds that combine running applications, real tools, and multi-step tasks reflecting real-world complexity. Used to train agents on long-horizon tasks that could take humans days to complete.
- **Research & Consulting**: Partnerships with frontier model labs to push the capabilities of autonomous agents through reinforcement learning in tailored environments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company).
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $8,125,000 (seed round of $8M announced in 2026, plus an earlier $125K from Y Combinator).
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Base10 (lead), Cervin Ventures (lead), SurgePoint Capital, Founders Future, Berkeley Frontier Fund, Y Combinator, and other angels.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount: 2 employees (co-founders) with +100% monthly growth on LinkedIn and active hiring for founding engineers, researchers, and operators.
  - Recent launch of Horizon-SWE benchmark (Feb 2026) gained community traction (308 reactions on LinkedIn).
  - Featured in Forbes alongside other YC W26 companies.
  - YC partner Ankit Gupta is the primary partner.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep simulation expertise**: Unlike narrow benchmarks, Polymath builds full, living environments that test real-world agent behavior over long horizons – a key bottleneck for autonomous AI.
- **Founder pedigree**: Co-founders from UC Berkeley (BAIR), Hume AI, Plaid, and Amazon – with hands-on experience post-training frontier models and building large-scale ML systems.
- **Early traction with frontier labs**: Already working with leading model labs, positioning Polymath as a critical infrastructure layer for agent training.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale the team**: Hiring engineers, researchers, and operators to accelerate environment development and partnerships.
- **Deepen partnerships with frontier labs**: Expand work with the world’s top AI research labs to integrate Polymath environments into their training pipelines.
- **Advance benchmark science**: Continue evolving Horizon-SWE and building new benchmarks to measure and improve agent reliability, safety, and autonomy.

## Why Work Here
- **Cutting-edge AI research**: Join a small, high-impact team at the frontier of agentic AI, working on one of the hardest problems in AI – long-horizon autonomy.
- **Founding team culture**: Early-stage startup with a flat structure, direct collaboration with co-founders, and significant ownership over technical direction.
- **Remote/hybrid flexibility**: Based in San Francisco, but open to remote (US) candidates. The YC listing shows “San Francisco, CA, US / Remote (US)”.
- **Compensation & perks**: Competitive salary ranges ($150K–$300K for engineering roles; $50–$100/hour for hourly roles) plus equity. Backed by top-tier investors including Y Combinator.
- **Growth opportunity**: Opportunity to shape the environment layer for the next generation of autonomous agents, with the potential to become a foundational platform in AI.

## Sources
1. [polymathlabs.ai](https://www.polymathlabs.ai/)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/polymath-ai-labs)
3. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/polymath)
4. [polymathlabs.ai/blog/seed-round](https://www.polymathlabs.ai/blog/seed-round)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polymath/44812b4a-b41c-4288-8232-e0131da6eefe)

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