Research Engineer, RL Env

Mecka AI is building data infrastructure for robotics and embodied AI, including systems for data capture, labeling, and hardware-enabled workflows. The Research Engineer will build reinforcement learning environments, develop rewards and evaluations, run controlled learning experiments, investigate failures, and collaborate with domain experts and engineers to create reusable research systems.

Responsibilities:

• Build environments: Define tasks, observations, actions and state transitions. Implement reset behavior, termination conditions and measurable outcomes in environments agents can interact with
• Develop rewards and scoring: Translate task objectives into feedback and evaluation criteria. Test whether agents can exploit scoring rules without completing the intended task
• Run learning experiments: Implement baseline agents, train and compare policies, and design controlled experiments that isolate the effects of data, methods and environment changes
• Make evaluation reliable: Separate training and held-out tasks, check for leakage, version experiments and repeat runs. Report uncertainty and performance across conditions alongside aggregate scores
• Investigate failures: Inspect trajectories and learning behavior to distinguish policy limitations from data, reward or environment problems. Use findings to prioritize the next experiment
• Build with the team: Work with domain experts to validate task assumptions and with engineers to turn research prototypes into reusable environments, evaluation tools and documented methods