--- title: 'Special Projects Operator at Idler' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/special-projects-operator-idler-san-francisco-0dq5yx0nt757' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-16' --- # Special Projects Operator at Idler - **Company:** Idler - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $125k–$400k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-09-06 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/idler/52dc59ef-08d0-4d08-8fe5-0e3c5dfd1424 ## Job description ## About idler idler is a frontier data research lab. We build the evals and environments that the world's leading frontier labs use to measure and train their models. After raising a $9m seed round led by Paradigm, we spent the last year developing coding evals for top coding models you know and love. At the same time, we've expanded into other domains besides coding: RSI & Auto-Research, Law, Enterprise Business, Cybersecurity, and others. Now, we are facing more lab demand for our data than we can serve, and are rapidly scaling the team to grow the business. Our approach to creating training data scales using technology, and all of our data products are built on a unified self-reinforcing platform that learns through experience. You would be joining a close-knit team that has reached product market fit, and your work would directly help to multiply our revenue. You can see some of our work here: https://idler.ai/collections ## About the Role Special Projects Operators are responsible for the relationships and the operations that connect our network of experts to our data production. As an SPO, you will recruit, onboard, and manage our experts, and you will build the systems and tooling to automate your recruitment and management processes. This role is half project management, half engineering. If you want to start a company one day, this is a good place to learn how. In this role, you will: - Recruit experts into our network — find the communities they belong to, build relationships within those communities, and bring the best people on board. - Design our expert hiring process — work with our research team to build the screening rubric for each new domain, run it, and automate as much of it as you can. - Run the network day to day — onboard experts, schedule them onto projects, fill gaps when someone drops out, check the quality of their work, run the payment cycle, and answer the support inbox. - Build the tooling the network runs on — replace the manual steps in applications, qualification, scheduling, scoring, payments, and reporting, and improve how our team and our experts communicate. - Keep the paperwork organized — run payroll tasks, file compliance documents, and provision and remove accounts. ## What we value - Scrappiness with people — you find the person who knows the person, and you are comfortable approaching a community you are not yet part of. - Grit, coupled with good judgement — you're comfortable operating in ambiguous, high-intensity environments. You're independent and resourceful, but you know when you should ask for help before acting. - Meticulous attention to detail — you would rather find and fix the problems in your work than let someone else discover them for you. ## Requirements - One to four years in an operationally intense environment, or an exceptional record as a new graduate. - Ability (and enthusiasm) to build your own tools with AI assistance. A professional engineering background is not required, but you must be able to read the documentation and get something working unaided. - Extraordinary literacy, as evidenced by written and verbal communication. You will write to experts, to partners, and to us. - A high tolerance for ambiguity, intensity, and sustained effort when the problem demands it. You might excel if you… - Have earned a place in a community you started outside of, and can explain how you did it. - Throw events, or host often, and know how to make people want to show up. - Come from a high-pressure, metrics-driven field like consulting or banking, where you had to be presentable and hit numbers at the same time. Details - In-person in San Francisco - Competitive salary + meaningful equity - Free meals in office - Healthcare, 401(k), 15 days of PTO per year - Relocation assistance - Small, ambitious team This is an in-person role in San Francisco. We're a tight-knit founding team and we play to win. Join us if you like to win too. ## About Idler ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Idler builds reinforcement learning environments that teach AI models to code at expert human levels, using real-world coding scenarios to prepare them for production challenges. - **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed, YC Summer 2025) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2025 - **Founders**: Nalu Concepcion, Ivan Chub, Tony Goss ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Reinforcement Learning - **Target customers**: Frontier AI labs, research organizations, and enterprises developing large language models (B2B, Enterprise) - **Mission**: To create the training data layer for frontier AI by building environments that teach models to code like the top 0.01% of engineers. ## Products & Services - **Reinforcement Learning Training Environments**: A platform that generates synthetic coding challenges and real-world scenarios for training AI models via reinforcement learning. These environments are designed to teach models complex, production-level coding skills. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not disclosed - **Key Metrics**: - **Total Funding**: $500,000 (Pre-Seed round led by Y Combinator, October 2025) - **Annual Revenue**: Estimated at $22.5M (LinkedIn estimate; likely a projection or early revenue figure for a 2025 startup) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (lead investor), Harj Taggar (primary partner) - **Growth Signals**: - Secured a multimillion-dollar contract with a leading foundation lab (largest they have issued to date) - Rapidly scaling team (currently 13-14 employees) to meet demand that outpaces delivery capacity - Active hiring for Software Engineers, Staff Software Engineer, and Special Projects Operator roles ## Competitive Advantages - **Focus on Real-World Scenarios**: Unlike generic coding datasets, Idler’s environments simulate the complex, messy challenges models face in production, making trained models more capable and reliable. - **Early Frontier Lab Contracts**: Already landed multimillion-dollar deals with top AI labs, validating demand and providing real-world feedback loops. - **Y Combinator Backing**: Part of the prestigious Summer 2025 batch, providing network, credibility, and early-stage support. ## Strategic Focus - **Scale Training Data Production**: Rapidly expand capacity to build environments for frontier AI models, aiming to become the default training data layer for reinforcement learning in coding. - **Hire Top Engineering Talent**: Grow the team (currently ~13) with senior engineers and operators who can move fast and think deeply about training data quality. - **Maintain In-Office Culture**: All employees work in person at the Dogpatch office in San Francisco to foster tight collaboration and rapid iteration. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Tight-knit founding team that moves quickly, thinks deeply about data, and “plays to win.” Emphasis on high agency and ownership. - **Work Environment**: 100% in-office at the Dogpatch neighborhood in San Francisco. No remote/hybrid option. - **Perks & Benefits**: - Competitive salary ($140K–$400K depending on role) plus equity (0.05%–1.0%) - Free daily meals, snacks, and drinks - Health insurance, 401(K), generous PTO, paid holidays - Wellness initiatives and company-sponsored outings - Office perks including on-site workspace - **Engineering Culture**: Uses modern stack (Next.js, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Honeycomb, GitHub). Emphasis on building high-quality training data infrastructure. ## Sources 1. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/idler) 2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/idler) 3. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/idlersai) 4. [ycombinator.com/jobs](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/idler/jobs) 5. [builtinsf.com](https://www.builtinsf.com/company/idlersai) ## Other roles at Idler - [Offensive Security RL Researcher](https://feeny.ai/job/offensive-security-rl-researcher-idler-san-francisco-pfs90khgnna7) — San Francisco, CA - [Executive Assistant](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-idler-san-francisco-kw6f4cb7sgs5) — San Francisco, CA - [Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-idler-san-francisco-1tr3n99m2wt8) — San Francisco, CA - [Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/design-engineer-idler-san-francisco-6jc914e1vqp3) — San Francisco, CA - [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-idler-san-francisco-5dydyq60g5jp) — San Francisco, CA - [Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-idler-san-francisco-safkzyj6b8y6) — San Francisco, CA