Platform / Infra Engineer

Emulated builds high-quality, long-horizon reinforcement-learning environments and post-training data for frontier labs. Customers include the major US frontier labs and top international labs. Most data vendors treat post-training data as a staffing problem. Emulated treats it as a research problem: scale faster than headcount by building a model that can produce post-training data on its own.

It is cash-flow positive. It raised a sub-$1M pre-seed, then took a seed offer a few months later to fund model training. The team is about 9 to 12 people: a published neuroscience research lead, founders with AWS software backgrounds in distributed databases and network infrastructure, people from Google, DeepMind, and NVIDIA, and a Stanford shock-physics PhD. They recently released Auto Research, a benchmark of how well models iterate in a machine-learning research loop. Seed stage, founded in 2025, in San Francisco.

Emulated is hiring a platform and infrastructure engineer to make the internal data-production platform as capable, as tightly tied to the research and data team, and as scalable as frontier-lab demand requires. The research seats blend research and data. This seat is more focused: systems and infrastructure for the platform that produces the data product.

You build and scale that platform. You keep it reliable as inbound lab demand grows. You integrate it with the research and data wing instead of handing work over a wall. The founders come from AWS distributed databases and network infrastructure, and that is the kind of work this is.

Bar: about 3 to 7 years. Strong infrastructure engineering: distributed systems, platform, and scaling. You have owned and scaled an internal platform end to end. Fast code comprehension. The technical round is self-contained, not LeetCode: finding bugs in the JVM, writing async I/O, and similar. You can build for a research team. App-layer-only, slow problem solving, or pedigree without the systems work are misses. Built a data-production or internal developer platform, depth in databases, networking, messaging, or orchestration, and JVM-level or concurrent systems experience are green flags.

In office in San Francisco, on an intense early team. Visa sponsorship is available. Posted work intensity is 9-9-6. The process is an intro with a founder, a technical round, then a work trial.