Xterra AI
AI Research Scientist
San Francisco · On-site · Full-time · Posted Apr 14, 2026
- Experience
- No specific number of years stated; hiring spans early-career through senior/staff levels.
About the job
Develops and deploys methods that help AI systems reason about complex scientific problems, from research and experimentation through production.
What you'll do
- Design and train reinforcement-learning systems for scientific hypothesis generation and evaluation.
- Develop process reward models, verifiers, and oversight methods for complex scientific reasoning.
- Build training pipelines, run large-scale experiments, and contribute to domain-specific benchmarks and evaluations.
What they ask for
- Strong machine-learning fundamentals and hands-on experience training large models; LLM experience is preferred but not required.
- Demonstrated reinforcement-learning experience, including experience from fields such as robotics, game-playing, or scientific discovery.
- Ability to work across research and engineering, including writing papers and debugging distributed training jobs.
- Familiarity with at least some of reward modeling, RLHF/RLAIF pipelines, search and planning methods, or AI alignment techniques.
Nice to have
- Publication record.
- For senior roles: independently driving high-impact research, mentoring researchers, influencing technical strategy, and deep expertise in a core technical area.
Tools
RLHF, RLAIF
AI focus
Research and engineering for AI reasoning in scientific tasks, including reinforcement learning, process supervision, scalable oversight, and evaluation.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative