Research Scientist / Engineer – Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure
Luma AI is hiring a Research Scientist / Engineer – Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure for a remote role open to applicants in United States. Level rates it ; you can apply on Luma AI.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this research scientist role: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting lists this role as remote.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include vLLM, PyTorch and Sglang.
- Level classifies it as a senior role.
- Level lists 29 other open roles at Luma AI.
AI in this role
Build and scale distributed reinforcement learning infrastructure, training loops, and reward pipelines for frontier AI models.
You'll build the systems that make reinforcement learning work at frontier scale — coupling policy optimization with large fleets of inference workers, agentic environments, and the reward and verification systems that turn model behavior into learning signal. RL is how Luma's models go from capable to useful.
RL at scale is a full-loop systems problem: training, rollout generation, environment execution, and reward computation running concurrently across thousands of GPUs, all needing to stay fast, stable, and correct together. It fits someone who has lived this — post-trained LLMs with RL, built environments and verifiers, and debugged asynchronous rollout pipelines at scale. If you haven't operated RL at real scale, this will be deep water.
What You'll Own
Design, build, and scale distributed RL post-training systems, orchestrating trainer, rollout, environment, and reward workloads across thousands of GPUs.
Build high-throughput rollout generation, integrating inference engines (vLLM, SGLang), weight synchronization, and asynchronous/off-policy schemes.
Design RL environments for agentic, multi-step tasks — sandboxed code execution, tool use, computer use, multimodal interaction — reproducible and scalable to millions of episodes.
Build reward infrastructure: verifiable/programmatic rewards, reward-model serving, LLM-as-judge pipelines, and defenses against reward hacking.
Develop the evaluation, monitoring, and debugging tooling that keeps large RL runs stable.
Advance training efficiency and stability, and turn new post-training ideas into production runs with researchers.
First 90 Days
One way the first 90 could unfold.
Days 1–30 — Immerse & Diagnose: Learn the current RL stack and where throughput, stability, or correctness break.
Days 30–60 — Ship & Validate: Improve a piece of the loop (rollout throughput, reward infra, or an environment) and prove it on a real run.
Days 60–90 — Scale & Systemize: Harden the full loop across thousands of GPUs and asynchronous architectures.
What You Bring
Hands-on experience post-training LLMs with RL (PPO/GRPO-family, RLHF, RLVR) at meaningful scale.
Extensive distributed PyTorch training and parallelism (FSDP, Tensor/Pipeline/Expert Parallel) for foundation models.
Experience building RL environments, reward functions, verifiers, or evaluation harnesses for LLM agents, including sandboxed execution and multi-turn tool use.
Deep familiarity with RL post-training frameworks (veRL, OpenRLHF, TRL, Ray orchestration) and rollout inference engines (vLLM, SGLang).
Strong understanding of GPU clusters, networking, and communication libraries (NCCL, MPI) under mixed training and inference workloads.
Nice to Have
Running RL training across 100+ GPUs, including asynchronous or disaggregated trainer/rollout architectures.
Containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, Ray) for large environment fleets and sandboxed workloads.
Research contributions in RL for LLMs, or open-source contributions to RL training frameworks.
About Luma: Luma's mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. We believe multimodality is critical for intelligence — the next step beyond language models comes from vision. Luma is an equal opportunity employer.
How we rate this
Research Scientist / Engineer – Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure at Luma AI rates 100 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in research scientist jobs at this level
Pay
- Typical research scientist job
- $192k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical research scientist figure when pay comes up. See research scientist jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Tell me about a project where reinforcement learning was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where rlhf was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where llm post training was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, Reinforcement learning, Rlhf, Distributed Systems, and LLM Post Training. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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