PI

Research Engineer - Data and Evaluation

Prime Intellect Research and Science Full-timeSan Francisco, CA $150,000 - $350,000 a year
Posted Oct 17, 2026 · Expires Nov 7, 2026

Quick facts

Pay
$150,000 - $350,000 a year
Type
Full-time
Location
San Francisco, CA
Skills
Python
Industry
Research and Science — 82 open jobs
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Free to apply — never pay anyone for a job offer or visa sponsorship

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

Build the tasks and environments that train Prime Intellect’s models through RL, and the evaluations that show what they can actually do. You’ll work directly with researchers to investigate model failures, from how a task is implemented to how success is scored.

Responsibilities

  • Design and build challenging evaluations for coding and long-horizon agents.

  • Build executable environments in Verifiers, with realistic task setup and clear success criteria.

  • Develop and test scoring logic and verifiers, investigating reward hacks and misleading measures of progress.

  • Trace failures through model outputs and harness code to distinguish model limitations from problems in the environment or scoring.

  • Build and scale RL data pipelines that generate and curate challenging coding and agentic tasks.

  • Work with RL researchers to test whether changes to tasks and training data improve performance on held-out tasks.

Requirements

  • Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience building data pipelines, evaluation systems, or ML workflows used by others.

  • Hands-on experience working with language models or agents, with an understanding of how training data and evaluation choices affect model behavior.

  • Ability to inspect complex data and model outputs, identify failure modes, and turn an ambiguous quality question into a testable measurement.

  • A record of owning technical projects through experimentation, implementation, and validation, while collaborating closely with researchers and engineers.

  • Hands-on experience building technical evaluations or agent environments, with the engineering depth to inspect model traces and debug harness and scoring code.

Relevant experience may include:

  • Large-scale synthetic data generation, dataset curation, or distributed processing for model training.

  • Evaluation methodology, executable coding tasks, agent environments, verifiers, or reward design.

  • Experiment analysis, statistical testing, contamination detection, and reproducible research tooling.

Nice to have

  • Experience with RL or post-training data, including task difficulty selection and analysis of rollout or reward distributions.

  • Contributions to Verifiers, Prime-RL, or comparable environment and evaluation frameworks.

  • Work on model-based grading, long-horizon coding agents, or diagnosing reward exploitation.

We welcome depth in data generation, environments and rewards, or evaluation systems. You don’t need to have worked across every area.

Benefits and Perks

  • Cash Compensation Range of $150-350k, including equity incentives, aligning your success with the growth and impact of Prime Intellect.

  • Flexible work arrangements, with the option to work remotely or in-person at our offices in San Francisco.

  • Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance for international candidates.

  • Quarterly team off-sites, hackathons, conferences and learning opportunities.

  • Opportunity to work with a talented, hard-working and mission-driven team, united by a shared passion for leveraging technology to accelerate science and AI.

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.

Visa sponsorship record: Prime Intellect, Inc.

Sponsors occasionally
3H-1B labor applications (LCA)100% certified
1H-1B petitions approved by USCISapproval rate 100% · 1 new
0Green card filings (PERM)no filings found
$142kMedian H-1B salaryfrom LCA filings
Fiscal yearH-1B LCAsUSCIS approvalsUSCIS denialsPERM
FY2026310—

This exact kind of role (Engineers, All Other) isn't among the roles Prime Intellect, Inc. sponsored most often.

Roles they sponsor most

  • member of technical gpu infrastructure2 LCAs · median $142k
  • applied researcher1 LCA · median $195k

Full sponsorship history of Prime Intellect, Inc. →

Which visas can work for this job

Occupation: Engineers, All Other (SOC 17-2199) — estimated from the job title.

  • H-1B cap-exempt employer

    Regular cap-subject employer — a new H-1B needs to win the lottery in March (unless you already hold cap-counted H-1B status).

  • TN (citizens of Canada and Mexico)

    This kind of role may fit the USMCA profession “Engineer” — it depends on the actual duties. No lottery, no cap; you need the matching degree or license.

  • E-3 (Australia) and H-1B1 (Chile, Singapore)

    Same degree requirement as H-1B, but no lottery and a separate quota that is rarely filled.

  • O-1 (extraordinary ability)

    For candidates with awards, publications, press, a high salary or critical roles at distinguished organizations. No cap, no lottery; the employer files a petition.

  • STEM OPT extension (F-1 students)

    Requires an E-Verify employer. We didn't find this company in the E-Verify list — ask HR.

Salary vs prevailing wage

Level II (qualified)

Engineers, All Other · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Annual prevailing wages set by the Department of Labor (OFLC).

L1L2L3L4
LevelPrevailing wageH-1B lottery odds*
Level I$98,051~15%
Level II$130,146~31%
Level III$162,261~46%
Level IV$194,355~61%

This job pays $150,000–$350,000 a year — that's Level II (qualified). In the wage-weighted H-1B lottery a Level II registration gets 2 entries; estimated selection chance about 31%.

* Odds are DHS projections for the FY2027 wage-weighted lottery (actual results vary by year and employer). Since the FY2027 cap season the H-1B lottery is weighted by wage level: Level I = 1 entry, II = 2, III = 3, IV = 4. The level is set by the offered wage against the prevailing wage for the occupation and worksite. Separately, a $100,000 fee for new H-1B petitions for workers outside the US was announced in 2025; as of September 2026 a federal court ruling keeps it unenforceable while appeals continue — check the current status.

Sources: U.S. Department of Labor OFLC disclosure data (H-1B/H-1B1/E-3 LCA, PERM), OFLC prevailing wage data, USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub, E-Verify participating employers. Data loaded: LCA FY2024–FY2026, PERM, USCIS Data Hub, OFLC wages; updated 2026-10-03. Employers are matched by name, so records of companies with similar names can occasionally be mixed up. This is general information, not legal advice — talk to an immigration attorney about your case.

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