Founding AI Researcher, RL

Goaly AI is a stealth AI startup focused on lowering the cost, time, and talent barriers to building proprietary AI. The Founding AI Researcher will own the experimental loop for turning base models into useful agents by designing environments, preparing data, running reinforcement-learning and post-training experiments, diagnosing model behavior, and improving production training pipelines.

Responsibilities:

• Design and run post-training experiments for agentic capabilities, including tool use, coding, reasoning, planning, long-horizon task completion, and recovery from failure
• Prepare high-quality training and evaluation data: define task distributions, curate and filter examples, control contamination, balance difficulty, and build reproducible data-generation pipelines
• Build realistic RL environments and task harnesses with clear interfaces, reliable resets, isolated execution, useful telemetry, and reward signals that are hard to game
• Develop evaluations that measure both capability and reliability. Create regression suites, behavioral slices, error taxonomies, and dashboards that connect aggregate metrics to concrete model failures
• Iterate on training recipes, including supervised warm starts, sampling strategies, reward design, verifiers, curricula, optimization choices, and reinforcement fine-tuning methods
• Analyze trajectories and model behavior to find reward hacking, shortcut learning, mode collapse, distribution gaps, and other failure modes; turn those findings into targeted experiments
• Improve the research workflow through better experiment configuration, rollout inspection, reproducibility, checkpoint evaluation, and automated comparison of runs
• Partner with systems engineers to debug cross-layer problems in rollout inference, environment execution, distributed training, and data movement
• Translate successful research ideas into stable, repeatable pipelines and help set the team's longer-term post-training roadmap