Metis

Infrastructure to build reliable agents

Research Engineer

$200K - $1M0.10% - 3.00%San Francisco, CA, US
Job type
Full-time
Role
Engineering, Machine learning
Experience
Any (new grads ok)
Visa
Will sponsor
Connect directly with founders of the best YC-funded startups.
Apply to role ›
Aryan Shah
Aryan Shah
Founder

About the role

About the Role

As a Research Engineer at Metis, you’ll work on building the next generation of autonomous post-training systems that leverage our Mantis platform. You’ll operate at the intersection of cutting-edge ML research and scalable engineering, designing, implementing, and deploying algorithms that improve how AI agents learn from feedback, synthetic data, and real-world interactions.

You’ll move seamlessly between papers and production, leading large-scale experiments, creating optimized training pipelines, and helping shape the future of post-training autonomy. You’ll have significant ownership, high compute budgets, and the mandate to push the state of the art in applied reinforcement and preference optimization.

What You'll Do

  • Research and help build an autonomous post-training agent leveraging the Mantis platform
  • Design and execute large-scale experiments on synthetic data generation and algorithmic architecture
  • Develop and refine methods for reinforcement learning, reward modeling, and human feedback integration
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with Core and Platform Engineering to deploy and evaluate models in production settings
  • Publish or contribute to leading-edge research in the post-training domain
  • Use tooling and compute efficiently to iterate on experimental pipelines and accelerate research velocity

Requirements

  • Deep experience in machine learning, preferably reinforcement learning, post-training, or alignment research
  • Demonstrated research contributions; ideally published papers (ICML, NeurIPS) or public implementations
  • Strong proficiency in Python and ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow)
  • Comfort with distributed training, high-throughput data pipelines, and large-scale experiment management
  • Ability to reason independently, formulate hypotheses, and run experiments from idea → insight → product impact

Compensation & Benefits

  • Base: $200,000–$1,000,000
  • Significant Equity
  • Full medical, dental, and vision
  • Wellness & L&D stipend
  • Equinox membership
  • Breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided (Unlimited Doordash)
  • $25,000 housing stipend

About Metis

Metis helps enterprises and labs build the most reliable AI agents by leveraging post-training. Our platform enables the creation, improvement, and deployment of the most capable frontier agents designed for rigorous, real-world workflows.

Momentum

  • 0 → six-figure monthly revenue in the last six weeks
  • Working with several Fortune 500 enterprises & frontier AI labs
  • Growing 150%+ MoM

Backed by

Y Combinator, CRV, and executives from OpenAI, Google, Mercor, NVIDIA, and others.

About Metis

Metis helps enterprises build reliable production agents and models by leveraging our reinforcement learning platform

Metis
Founded:2025
Batch:S25
Team Size:7
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Founders
Aryan Shah
Aryan Shah
Founder
Aayush Sheth
Aayush Sheth
Founder
Marcus Yearwood
Marcus Yearwood
Founder