---
title: 'Staff Software Engineer, AI Data Platform at Labelbox'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-ai-data-platform-labelbox-san-francisco-6tgah5atnmsm'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-14'
---

# Staff Software Engineer, AI Data Platform at Labelbox

- **Company:** Labelbox
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $250k–$280k
- **Posted:** 2026-06-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/labelbox/jobs/5159327007

## Job description

Shape the Future of AI

At Labelbox, we're building the critical infrastructure that powers breakthrough AI models at leading research labs and enterprises. Since 2018, we've been pioneering data-centric approaches that are fundamental to AI development, and our work becomes even more essential as AI capabilities expand exponentially.

## About Labelbox

We're the only company offering three integrated solutions for frontier AI development:

- Enterprise Platform & Tools: Advanced annotation tools, workflow automation, and quality control systems that enable teams to produce high-quality training data at scale
- Frontier Data Labeling Service: Specialized data labeling through Alignerr, leveraging subject matter experts for next-generation AI models
- Expert Marketplace: Connecting AI teams with highly skilled annotators and domain experts for flexible scaling

## Why Join Us

- High-Impact Environment: We operate like an early-stage startup, focusing on impact over process. You'll take on expanded responsibilities quickly, with career growth directly tied to your contributions.
- Technical Excellence: Work at the cutting edge of AI development, collaborating with industry leaders and shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
- Innovation at Speed: We celebrate those who take ownership, move fast, and deliver impact. Our environment rewards high agency and rapid execution.
- Continuous Growth: Every role requires continuous learning and evolution. You'll be surrounded by curious minds solving complex problems at the frontier of AI.
- Clear Ownership: You'll know exactly what you're responsible for and have the autonomy to execute. We empower people to drive results through clear ownership and metrics.

## Role Overview

Labelbox is the RL data factory for advancing frontier agent capabilities. We build the data, evaluations, and infrastructure that frontier labs use to train and judge their agents. We're looking for talented, experienced engineers to join us. The bar is high: engineers who have strong judgment and set technical direction, quickly build prototypes that scale into the reliable systems, and are at the frontier of agent-first engineering practices and innovating to accelerate the speed of the business.

## What you may work on

- Eval systems that run millions of agent trajectories to measure model and product quality.
- Fine-tuning pipelines that turn evaluation signals into measurable agent improvements.
- Agent-first product surfaces: UX and infrastructure for workflows where the user is a model or an agent operator.
- The systems behind hundreds of thousands of AI interviews used to source and match freelance workers to projects.
- Infrastructure that scales to the throughput frontier labs actually need.
- Integration of the latest models and capabilities into production within days of release.

## What we're looking for

- 4+ year track record of shipping systems customers and other engineers rely on
- You build full stack prototypes fast and they hold up. The v1 you ship becomes the foundation the rest of the team builds on.
- Strong system and API design judgement
- Hard architecture and product calls land with you. You make them, defend them under pressure, and update fast when someone else is right.
- You ship production code with coding agents daily. You know where they break and what it takes to make them reliable to further accelerate the team's velocity.
- You set direction by being the example. Other engineers reach for your designs and your code as the reference.
- You move fast in ambiguous, startup-pace environments with influence over authority.
- You have worked in all parts of the stack
- Deep proficiency in TypeScript and/or Python.

## Nice to have

- Production experience building LLM- or agent-driven products.
- Designing evaluations for LLMs and agents, or producing high-quality data for ML systems.
- Background in production distributed systems, ML infrastructure, or data systems at scale.

Our Technology Stack

Our engineering team works with a modern tech stack designed for scalability, performance, and developer efficiency:

- Frontend: React.js with Redux, TypeScript
- Backend: Node.js, TypeScript, Python, some Java & Kotlin
- APIs: GraphQL
- Cloud & Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes
- Databases: MySQL, Spanner, PostgreSQL
- Queueing / Streaming: Kafka, PubSub

Labelbox strives to ensure pay parity across the organization and discuss compensation transparently.  The expected annual base salary range for United States-based candidates is below. This range is not inclusive of any potential equity packages or additional benefits. Exact compensation varies based on a variety of factors, including skills and competencies, experience, and geographical location.

Annual base salary range $250,000—$280,000 USD

Life at Labelbox

- Environment: Fast-paced and high-intensity, perfect for ambitious individuals who thrive on ownership and quick decision-making
- Growth: Career advancement opportunities directly tied to your impact
- Vision: Be part of building the foundation for humanity's most transformative technology

Our Vision

We believe data will remain crucial in achieving artificial general intelligence. As AI models become more sophisticated, the need for high-quality, specialized training data will only grow. Join us in developing new products and services that enable the next generation of AI breakthroughs.

Labelbox is backed by leading investors including SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, B Capital, Gradient Ventures, Databricks Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading AI labs.

Your Personal Data Privacy: Any personal information you provide Labelbox as a part of your application will be processed in accordance with Labelbox’s [Job Applicant Privacy notice](https://docs.labelbox.com/page/job-applicant-privacy-notice).

Any emails from Labelbox team members will originate from a @labelbox.com email address. If you encounter anything that raises suspicions during your interactions, we encourage you to exercise caution and suspend or discontinue communications.

## About Labelbox

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Labelbox builds the data engine for frontier AI, producing environments, expert signals, and platforms that leading AI labs and enterprises use to train, evaluate, and deploy reinforcement learning (RL) models.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Funding stage: $189M total funding to date)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (Mission District)
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Manu Sharma (CEO) – other co-founders not publicly named in available sources.

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence – data infrastructure for RL and frontier model training.
- **Target customers**: B2B – frontier AI labs (partnering with over 90% of leading U.S. AI labs) and enterprise teams building specialist AI agents.
- **Mission**: "Turn human knowledge into compounding intelligence, making the learning loop the foundation of an AI team’s competitive advantage."

## Products & Services
- **Recursion** – RL platform for enterprise specialist models. Integrates enterprise APIs, SaaS tools, databases into simulation environments; enables scenario generation, RL training, evaluation, and deployment.
- **Horizon** – RL environments and evaluations for post-training, covering reasoning, tool use, and computer use across autonomous AI research, agent coding, scientific knowledge work, and cybersecurity.
- **Alignerr** – Expert network of 2.6M+ knowledge contributors across 200+ domains, providing human preference signals and reward data for frontier models.
- **Terra** – Full-stack data products for robotics foundation models (video, trajectories, multimodal annotations) collected with purpose-built hardware and AI-powered diversity engines.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: $189M in total funding to date (as of mid-2026).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not explicitly listed in available sources; partners include "over 90% of leading AI labs in the U.S." and Meta (case study on GIM benchmark).
- **Growth Signals**:  
  - 2.6M+ Alignerr network across 40+ countries.  
  - Published a benchmark with Meta (GIM-615) for evaluating frontier AI reasoning.  
  - Growing headcount: 13 open roles listed on Greenhouse (Applied Research, Engineering, Alignerr Services, Sales).  
  - Expanding from annotation into full RL data engine (Recursion, Horizon, Terra).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unique data engine for RL**: Combines expert human signals (Alignerr) with simulated environments (Recursion, Horizon) and robotics data (Terra) – a full stack for reinforcement learning that few competitors offer.
- **Deep partnerships**: Collaborates with leading U.S. AI labs, providing a strong network effect.
- **Proven research output**: Co-developed the GIM benchmark with Meta, demonstrating credibility in frontier evaluation.
- **Enterprise focus**: Helps companies turn proprietary workflows into training data for specialist models that outperform general LLMs on narrow tasks at lower cost.

## Strategic Focus
- Doubling down on reinforcement learning data infrastructure: building environments, reward signals, and evaluation tools for post-training and agentic AI.
- Scaling the Alignerr expert network to cover more domains and languages.
- Expanding enterprise adoption of Recursion to convert proprietary workflows into production-grade specialist models.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: "Operate like an early-stage startup, even at our current stage." Fast-paced, high-intensity, high individual ownership, impact over process.
- **Location**: HQ in San Francisco’s Mission District – "heart of the AI boom."
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Roles listed as "San Francisco Bay Area" – likely office-first with some flexibility (not explicitly stated as remote).
- **Perks**: Unlimited PTO, $150/month WFH stipend, $1k annual education stipend, annual travel stipend, paid family leave, medical/dental/vision, HSA/FSA, 401(k) management, employee-paid life & disability.
- **Growth**: "Take on expanded responsibilities quickly; career growth tied to impact." Opportunity to work at the cutting edge of AI development with industry leaders.
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on technical excellence, rapid execution, and solving complex problems in frontier AI.

## Sources
1. [labelbox.com](https://labelbox.com/) – Company homepage, product descriptions, partnership stats.
2. [labelbox.com/company/about/](https://labelbox.com/company/about/) – About page, mission, funding, team, perks.
3. [labelbox.com/company/careers/](https://labelbox.com/company/careers/) – Careers page, work environment, benefits, values.
4. [job-boards.greenhouse.io/labelbox](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/labelbox) – Current open roles and locations.

## Other roles at Labelbox

- [Accounts Payable, Spend Management Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/accounts-payable-spend-management-coordinator-labelbox-india-6ev3gkwk5nsb) — India
- [Global Specialized Domain Expert Recruiter (Contractor)](https://feeny.ai/job/global-specialized-domain-expert-recruiter-contractor-labelbox-united-states-cggdd2bjm5x0) — United States
- [Staff ML Engineer, Agent Training & Environments](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-ml-engineer-agent-training-environments-labelbox-san-francisco-61fyf5x8bnnw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Cyber Security Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/cyber-security-intern-labelbox-san-francisco-81atck2vj8rq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Targeted Recruiting & Onboarding Specialist (Contractor)](https://feeny.ai/job/targeted-recruiting-onboarding-specialist-contractor-labelbox-india-p380f0dmy14b) — India
- [Managing Partner](https://feeny.ai/job/managing-partner-labelbox-san-francisco-na902x0e4rs1) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Engineering Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineering-manager-labelbox-san-francisco-pxxp75hvtt47) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-research-scientist-labelbox-san-francisco-x2c58bs8fmmm) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Engineer, RL Environments](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-rl-environments-labelbox-san-francisco-s4zt23ad43kc) — San Francisco, CA