logo

Handshake

Senior Engineering Manager, Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE)

Department
Engineering
Job Type / Location
San Francisco
Experience Required
8+ years
Posted On

About the Role

We’re hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) team - the group building the interactive sandboxes where frontier models learn to complete real work.

RLE environments simulate end-to-end workflows across domains like software engineering, finance, and legal research, with realistic tools, constraints, and feedback loops. The platform generates high-signal interaction data researchers use to train and evaluate models for task completion, quality, and robustness.

This is a high-leverage role: the systems you lead directly shape what models can learn, how quickly new domains can launch, and how much researchers trust the signal. You’ll lead a team of ~7 engineers today and are expected to add leadership capacity (including managing an EM) as we scale.

Location: San Francisco, CA. This is an in-office role, 5 days/week (no remote/hybrid)

What You’ll Do

  • Lead, hire, and develop a high-performing team building RL environments and the platform behind them
  • Own the RLE roadmap and execution in close partnership with Research, Product, and Operations
  • Drive architecture for scalable, reliable, extensible environment systems and data generation pipelines
  • Build modular, plug-and-play domains that integrate cleanly with training and evaluation loops
  • Raise the bar on reliability, observability, performance, and data quality
  • Create a culture of ownership, speed, and strong engineering fundamentals in an ambiguity heavy setting

What We’re Looking For

  • Engineering leader + builder: 3+ years managing teams, plus 5+ years hands-on engineering experience
  • Strong people leadership: experience leading senior engineers; managing an EM (or equivalent scope) is a plus
  • Execution in ambiguity: proven ability to align cross-functionally and deliver in fast-moving, unclear problem spaces
  • Systems + product mindset: strong platform/distributed systems background, and the ability to turn research/ops needs into a clear roadmap, ship iteratively, and measure outcomes

Nice to Have

  • Experience with RL training infrastructure, simulation systems, or evaluation platforms
  • Human-in-the-loop systems (annotation, rubric tooling, QA pipelines, workflow platforms)
  • Operations-heavy, tech-enabled environment experience
  • Familiarity with AWS/GCP, APIs, Docker, and modern stacks (TypeScript/Node, React)
  • Experience building systems used by applied ML or AI research teams

View Assessment Process

Think you'll be a good fit?