Research Engineer, Benchmarks

Job Description

**About HUD**
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HUD is building infrastructure to create RL training data and evals for frontier AI agents, as well as a marketplace to sell these to frontier labs through the HUD marketplace. Our platform is used by frontier labs, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. We've raised $16M from top VCs and were YC W25.

**About the role**
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We're looking for Research Engineers to build high-quality benchmarks for evaluating frontier agents on domain-specific tasks. You'll build benchmarks that are technically rigorous, practically useful, and credible to frontier labs.

**Responsibilities**
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* Own the design, implementation, and quality of HUD's internal agent benchmarks

* Work with subject-matter experts to define tasks and create domain-specific benchmarks that evaluate agents on realistic workflows

* Build infrastructure to reliably run models and agents against benchmark tasks

* Develop metrics and analyses to understand benchmark difficulty, reliability, and failure modes

* Validate whether benchmark performance correlates with real-world evals, customer needs, and lab expectations

* Write clear documentation and benchmark reports that make results legible and credible to technical audiences

Experience
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**You may be a good fit if you have:**

* Proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments

* Published papers or written technical blogs on relevant topics such as public benchmarks and their limitations, model failure modes, etc. **- please link in your application**

* Strong understanding of what a "good benchmark" means and what makes one realistic, reliable, and useful

* Experience working on environments and evals

* Curiosity and ability to truly understand how workflows in various domains work

**Strong candidates may also:**

* Be detail-oriented and able to spot subtle inconsistencies or edge cases in tasks

* Be able to reason from first principles about task design, scoring, and failure modes

* Thrive in unstructured problem spaces

* Early-stage startup experience with ability to work independently in fast-paced environments

* Strong communication skills for remote collaboration across time zones

*We prioritize technical aptitude and learning potential over years of experience. Motivated candidates are encouraged to apply even if they don't meet all criteria.*

**Team \& company details**
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* **Team Size**: \~15 people currently, mostly full-time in-person, but some remote.

* **Our team:** Our team includes 4 International Olympiad medalists (IOI, ILO, IPhO), serial AI startup founders, and researchers with publications at ICLR, NeurIPS, etc.

* **Company stage:** We have 8 figures in funding and high revenue growth. We're scaling profitably and quickly to meet very strong demand.

**Logistics**
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* **Employment**: Full-time.

* **Location**: On-site only, for now. You can join the team in the San Francisco Bay Area or Singapore offices.

* **Visa Sponsorship**: We provide support for relocation and visas for strong full-time candidates to the US or Singapore.

* **Timeline**: Applications are rolling. The process is 2 technical interviews and a 2-3 day work trial.

What we offer
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* Competitive compensation

* 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision from Blue Shield of CA (US employees)

* Lunch and dinner when you're in the office

* Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year's Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays

* Other perks including an Equinox membership, 401k, and commuter benefits (US employees)

* Unlimited\* access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc. \**By unlimited, we mean no one on our token usage leaderboard has ever hit a limit. So we have no idea what the limit is.*

Due to high volume, we may not actively respond to every application, but feel free to contact us at [email protected] or elsewhere if we missed your application!