---
title: 'Research Engineer at Bespoke Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-vv4mp69f8z1b'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Research Engineer at Bespoke Labs

- **Company:** Bespoke Labs
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-01-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/bespokelabs/2a909b5d-f17a-4a52-bcd3-b38af612d95c

## Job description

## About Bespoke Labs

Bespoke Labs is an applied AI research lab pioneering data and RL environment curation for training and evaluating agents. Recently, we curated [Open Thoughts](https://open-thoughts.ai/), one of the best open reasoning datasets used by multiple frontier labs, trained SOTA specialized models such as [Bespoke-MiniChart-7B](https://www.bespokelabs.ai/blog/bespoke-minichart-7b) and [Bespoke-MiniCheck](https://www.bespokelabs.ai/bespoke-minicheck), and [taught](https://www.bespokelabs.ai/blog/improving-multi-turn-tool-use-with-reinforcement-learning) agents to do multi-turn tool-calling with reinforcement learning. Bespoke is uniquely positioned to capture a large market share of data and RL environment curation.

## About The Role

We're looking for a Research Engineer to bridge cutting-edge research with production-scale development and deployment of RL environments. You'll work at the intersection of research and engineering—collaborating with frontier labs and enterprise customers to understand their needs, then translating those insights into systematic environment creation. This role requires both research depth and execution excellence. You'll need to understand the latest advances in agent training, communicate effectively with research teams at top labs, and build robust systems that deliver high-quality environments at scale. You're equally comfortable reading papers, prototyping novel approaches, and shipping production pipelines. You'll work closely with both external collaborators (frontier labs, enterprise partners) and internal teams to ensure our research insights translate into valuable products that advance the state of agent training.

## What You'll Do

Research & Collaboration

- Partner with frontier AI labs to understand their agent training needs and design custom environments.
- Stay current with latest research in RL, agent training, and evaluation methodologies.
- Prototype novel approaches to environment generation, curriculum design, and data curation.
- Translate academic insights into practical engineering solutions.

Environment & Data Pipeline Development

- Build and maintain scalable systems for creating, validating, and deploying RL environments
- Develop systematic approaches to data curation that ensure quality and diversity
- Create automated quality assurance pipelines for environment verification
- Design evaluation frameworks that measure environment effectiveness

Customer Engagement

- Work directly with enterprise customers to understand their specific agent training challenges
- Customize environment suites and benchmarks for different use cases and domains
- Provide technical guidance on best practices for agent training and evaluation
- Present research findings and product capabilities to technical stakeholders

Production Excellence

- Scale research prototypes into production-ready systems that handle large-scale deployment
- Establish reproducible workflows and maintain high engineering standards
- Create documentation and tools that enable both internal teams and external users
- Monitor and optimize system performance as we scale environment production

## What We're Looking For

Research Background

- MS or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related field, OR equivalent industry research experience
- Track record of research contributions (publications, open-source projects, or deployed research systems)
- Deep understanding of reinforcement learning, agent training, or related areas
- Ability to read and implement ideas from recent papers

Technical Execution

- Strong Python skills and experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, or similar)
- Experience building production systems or research infrastructure at scale
- Proficiency with cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) and distributed computing
- Systematic approach to testing, validation, and quality assurance
- Ability to use modern tools such as Claude Code effectively.

Collaboration & Communication

- Excellent communication skills for working with research teams and enterprise customers
- Experience translating between research concepts and practical requirements
- Ability to scope projects, set priorities, and deliver on commitments
- Comfortable presenting technical work to diverse audiences

Product Mindset

- Understanding of what makes research artifacts valuable to users
- Experience shipping products, datasets, or tools used by others
- Attention to detail in documentation, usability, and user experience
- Customer-focused approach to problem-solving

## Nice to Have

- Hands-on experience with RL agent training or evaluation systems
- Background in data-centric AI, synthetic data generation, or dataset creation
- Publications in top ML/AI conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.)
- Previous experience in a research engineering or applied scientist role
- Contributions to widely-used datasets, benchmarks, or evaluation suites

Logistics Location: Mountain View, CA Compensation: Competitive salary and equity Benefits: Health coverage, and the opportunity to work directly with the world's leading AI research labs

## About Bespoke Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Bespoke Labs is an applied AI research lab building company-scale RL environments and data curation infrastructure to train reliable, production-grade AI agents.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: Mountain View, California, United States (with an office in Santa Clara, CA)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Mahesh Sathiamoorthy (CEO, formerly Google DeepMind) and Alex Dimakis (CSO, Professor at UC Berkeley)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Applied AI Research / Software Development (Agent Infrastructure)
- **Target customers**: B2B — Frontier AI labs (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind) and enterprises needing to train, evaluate, and optimize complex, long-horizon AI agents for production.
- **Mission**: To build the environment infrastructure for the agent revolution, making AI agents dependable in production by creating entire digital worlds for training.

## Products & Services
- **Company-Scale RL Environments**: Infrastructure that simulates real codebases and microservices, allowing agents to master complex, long-horizon workflows required for production.
- **Agent Evaluation & Optimization (GEPA)**: An evolutionary algorithm (GEPA optimizer) that automates prompt and policy searches, achieving superior accuracy faster than manual prompt engineering. Over 200 teams use GEPA in production.
- **Production-Grade RL & Benchmarking**: Collaborative research in RL, data curation, and benchmarking to ensure training environments keep pace with the advancing frontier of model capabilities.
- **OpenThoughts Dataset**: One of the best open reasoning datasets (10k+ monthly downloads on Hugging Face), cited in ICLR 2026.
- **Terminal-Bench**: The first environment-based benchmark for agentic systems, cited by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, published at ICLR 2026.
- **Bespoke-MiniCheck & Bespoke-MiniChart**: SOTA models developed in-house for fact-checking and chart understanding.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Total Funding**: $8.25M (Seed Round, June 2024).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lead investor is **8VC**. Advisors include Tasso Argyros (VP of Eng at Databricks, ex-CEO of ActionIQ), Joseph Gonzalez (Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, creator of LMSYS/vLLM), and Greg Durrett (Associate Professor at NYU). Cited by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew **+238.5% year-over-year** (from ~8 to 28 employees). Monthly headcount growth is **+33.3%**. Active job postings increased **+183.3% quarterly** (34 open positions). Over 200 teams use GEPA in production. OpenThoughts sees 10k+ monthly downloads.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-Mover in Agent Environments**: They identified the bottleneck for agent reliability is the environment, not the model, and are building the foundational infrastructure for this new paradigm.
- **SOTA Research Output**: Published work at ICLR 2026 (Terminal-Bench, GEPA, OpenThoughts) that is being cited and used by frontier labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind).
- **Strong Academic & Industry Ties**: Founded by a Google DeepMind alum and a UC Berkeley professor, with advisors from Databricks, UC Berkeley, and NYU. Team includes alumni from Google, Scale AI, Microsoft, and AI2.
- **Open Source Influence**: OpenThoughts is a widely used open reasoning dataset, building community credibility and attracting top talent.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale the Environment Infrastructure**: Build increasingly complex and realistic digital worlds for training agents, moving beyond demos to production-grade reliability.
- **Expand Enterprise Adoption**: Help enterprises evaluate and optimize agents in environments that mirror their specific systems and processes.
- **Continue Frontier Research**: Push the boundaries of RL, data curation, and benchmarking to maintain a lead in the agent training space.
- **Talent Acquisition**: Aggressively hiring researchers and engineers (34 open roles) to scale the team and the product.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact, Cutting-Edge AI Work**: Opportunity to work on one of the most important problems in AI — making agents reliable. The team is described as "exceptional researchers and engineers."
- **Strong Research Culture**: The lab publishes at top venues (ICLR) and contributes to open source (OpenThoughts). The work is a blend of product engineering and fundamental research.
- **Rapid Growth Stage**: With 238% YoY headcount growth and a recent seed round, this is an early-stage opportunity to shape the company's culture and technical direction.
- **Office-First, Collaborative Environment**: Based in Mountain View/Santa Clara with an emphasis on in-person collaboration. The team is small (28 people) but growing fast.
- **Notable Alumni & Hiring Sources**: The team attracts talent from Scale AI, Berkeley RISE Lab, Google DeepMind, and Grammarly, indicating a high-caliber peer group.
- **Open Roles**: Actively hiring for GPU/CUDA Engineers, Product Engineers, Scientific ML Engineers (PhD Interns), and Quantitative Financial Specialists, among others.

## Sources
1. [bespokelabs.ai](https://www.bespokelabs.ai/)
2. [bespokelabs.ai/about-us](https://www.bespokelabs.ai/about-us)
3. [linkedin.com/company/bespokelabsai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/bespokelabsai)
4. [pitchbook.com/profiles/company/651710-80](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/651710-80)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/bespokelabs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/bespokelabs)

## Other roles at Bespoke Labs

- [RL Environments Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/rl-environments-engineer-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-r1brn5r4z8ex) — Mountain View, CA
- [Desktop/System Administrator](https://feeny.ai/job/desktop-system-administrator-bespoke-labs-bengaluru-f4e04cka1jkn) — Bengaluru, India
- [Backend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/backend-engineer-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-2wfkmwxgk7se) — Mountain View, CA
- [Full Stack Engineer - MTV](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-engineer-mtv-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-mv3kv8nrts8f) — Mountain View, CA
- [Full Stack Engineer - BLR, India](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-engineer-blr-india-bespoke-labs-bengaluru-pazpmr8p8dp8) — Bengaluru, India
- [Engagement Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/engagement-manager-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-4aevsp00m946) — Mountain View, CA
- [Founding Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-recruiter-bespoke-labs-remote-hnw3zbanavm6)
- [Product Engineer (Bangalore)](https://feeny.ai/job/product-engineer-bangalore-bespoke-labs-bengaluru-zg7eead9kgg5) — Bengaluru, India
- [Design and Brand Storyteller](https://feeny.ai/job/design-and-brand-storyteller-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-asg657e8gnwr) — Mountain View, CA
- [AI Enterprise Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-enterprise-engineer-bespoke-labs-mountain-view-cvams3d3p42m) — Mountain View, CA