# Forward Deployed Research Engineer - Company: [Clera]() - Location: San Francisco - Team: Engineering - Employment type: Full Time - Salary: $150K – $250K - Posted: August 27, 2026 ## Job description ### About the Role This is a hands-on, end-to-end ownership role on a small, high-caliber engineering team building infrastructure for AI evaluation and reinforcement learning environments. You'll be the person who unblocks critical deployments for frontier AI labs and data vendors — diagnosing ambiguous problems fast, shipping solutions, and turning repeated firefighting into durable tooling. The work is urgent, impactful, and rarely fully prescribed. ### What You'll Do * Take the lead on diagnosing and resolving ambiguous technical problems as they arise. * Own technical deployment requests from frontier AI labs and data vendors, from initial triage through to completion. * Ask the right questions to clarify underspecified asks and identify what actually needs to be built. * Build one-off tools and pipelines to solve urgent customer or partner problems quickly. * Coordinate with research and go-to-market teams to keep deployments moving. * Balance speed and quality under time pressure when the path forward isn't fully defined. * Document recurring issues and convert repeated manual work into reusable tools and processes. ### What We're Looking For * 2–4 years of experience in applied research engineering, forward-deployed engineering, or a closely related hands-on technical role. * Proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments. * Experience working on benchmarks and evals — with solid judgment about task realism, rubric reliability, and trajectory quality for RL training. * Strong debugging instincts across code, data, and environments. * Proven ability to operate independently in ambiguous situations without a fully prescribed roadmap. * Comfort working directly with technical customers, vendors, and cross-functional internal teams. * Experience handling urgent production, customer, or deployment issues under pressure. * Early-stage startup experience and the ability to move fast in a small, high-ownership environment. * Strong written and verbal communication skills for async, cross-timezone collaboration. ### Compensation & Benefits Salary range: **$150,000 – $250,000 USD** annually. Visa sponsorship is available. ### Location On-site in **San Francisco, CA, USA**. Candidates based in or able to relocate to San Francisco are preferred. The role may also be based in Singapore. ## Apply [Apply on Clera]() Canonical job page: