Senior/Staff Applied AI Engineer, Agents

At Scale, our mission is to accelerate the development of AI applications. For 8 years, Scale has been the leading AI data foundry, helping fuel the most exciting advancements in AI, including: generative AI, defense applications, and autonomous vehicles. With our recent Series F round, we’re accelerating the development of autonomous AI agents in frontier labs through agentic data and evaluations, paving the road to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

About the ACE Team

The Agent Capabilities & Environments (ACE) team, part of Scale’s Research organization, brings together customer-facing Researchers and Applied AI Engineers. Our core mission includes benchmarking autonomous agent performance across real-world scenarios and environments, creating robust data programs to improve Large Language Models (LLMs) agentic capabilities, and building foundational tools and frameworks for evaluating models as agents. ACE focuses on autonomous agents that dynamically interact with diverse external environments, including code repositories, GUI interfaces, browsers, and more.

About the Role

As a Senior/Staff Applied AI Engineer on the ACE team, you’ll play a crucial role bridging state-of-the-art generative AI research, practical agent development, and the specialized data required to advance agentic systems.

You will:

• Develop frameworks and tools to benchmark and evaluate advanced agent capabilities.
• Construct realistic environments for training and evaluating autonomous agents.
• Design agent-focused data programs leveraging supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) methodologies.
• Create robust data pipelines and novel agentic data types from diverse environments, including code repositories, web browsers, and computer systems.
• Collaborate closely with customers to understand requirements, guide model development, and achieve product objectives.
• Implement and adapt popular open-source agent libraries and benchmarks using proprietary datasets and models

Ideally you’d have:

• Min. 5+ years of practical experience building AI applications for real-world use cases.
• Strong engineering and AI fundamentals, supported by a Bachelors’s and/or Master’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a closely related field.
• Deep understanding of modern deep learning methods, LLM technologies, and data-centric AI methodologies.
• Proven proficiency in Python, with experience writing, testing, and debugging code using standard data science libraries (e.g., NumPy, Pandas).
• Previous experience in customer-facing roles, effectively translating complex requirements into actionable development goals.
• Passion for solving ambiguous, complex technical challenges using cutting-edge research.

Nice-to-haves:

• Hands-on experience developing AI applications within the modern Generative AI stack (OpenAI APIs, commercial or open-source LLMs).
• Experience building autonomous agents that leverage external tools, produce structured outputs, and interact with various environments.
• Familiarity with agent benchmarking datasets such as SWE-Bench, tau-bench, and OS-World.

Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position, determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, interview performance, and relevant education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. You’ll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.

Please reference the job posting's subtitle for where this position will be located. For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time position in the locations of San Francisco, New York, Seattle is:

$216,000 - $270,000 USD

PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.