Senior Engineering Manager, Reinforcement Learning Environments; RLE
Listed on 2026-06-18
-
Software Development
Software Project Mgr/ Lead, Software Architect, AI Engineer (Applied/Software)
About Handshake
Handshake is the career network for the AI economy. 20 million knowledge workers, 1,600 educational institutions, 1 million employers (including 100% of the Fortune 50), and every foundational AI lab trust Handshake to power career discovery, hiring, and upskilling, from freelance AI training gigs to first internships to full-time careers and beyond. This unique value is leading to unparalleled growth; in 2025, we tripled our ARR at scale.
WhyJoin Handshake Now
- Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel
- Work hand-in-hand with world‑class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions
- Join a team with leadership from Scale AI, Meta, xAI, Notion, Coinbase, and Palantir, among others
- Build a massive, fast‑growing business with billions in revenue
The Role
We’re expanding our team and seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) team. The RLE team builds the sandbox environments where frontier AI models learn complete, end-to-end workflows. These environments simulate real-world professional domains such as software engineering, finance, and legal research — complete with realistic tools, constraints, and feedback loops. Instead of learning from static examples, models practice doing the work: navigating multi-step tasks, using domain-specific tools, handling ambiguity, and optimizing for real outcomes.
Researchers use these environments and the data they generate to train state-of-the‑art models with reinforcement learning grounded in execution — not just prediction, but task completion, quality, and robustness in complex workflows.
As a Senior Engineering Manager, you’ll shape the technical direction and long‑term strategy of this critical platform. You’ll lead a growing team (currently 9 engineers) and will likely manage an Engineering Manager in the near term. This is a highly strategic role sitting at the intersection of platform engineering, applied AI infrastructure, research tooling, and human‑in‑the‑loop operations systems.
LocationSan Francisco, CA | 5 days/week in‑office
Responsibilities- Lead and grow a high‑performing team of 8–9 engineers building reinforcement learning environments
- Manage, mentor, and develop senior engineers and future engineering leaders
- Partner closely with research, product, and operations teams to define roadmap and execution priorities
- Drive technical architecture for scalable, reliable, and extensible environment systems
- Build plug‑and‑play environments that integrate seamlessly with model training pipelines
- Balance platform rigor with operational complexity and data quality requirements
- Establish engineering best practices around reliability, observability, and performance
- Foster a culture of ownership, velocity, and high technical standards
- 3+ years of engineering management experience, with increasing scope and ownership
- Experience managing senior engineers; experience managing an Engineering Manager (or equivalent scope) strongly preferred
- 5+ years of prior hands‑on engineering experience
- Strong technical background in platform systems, distributed systems, or full‑stack infrastructure
- Experience building internal platforms, data pipelines, or research-facing tools
- Proven ability to operate effectively in fast‑paced, ambiguous environments
- Experience driving cross‑functional alignment across engineering, research, and operations
- Willingness to work in‑office in San Francisco 5 days/week
- Experience in reinforcement learning, simulation systems, or AI training infrastructure
- Background in human‑in‑the‑loop systems, data annotation platforms, or workflow tooling
- Experience in operations‑heavy, tech‑enabled organizations
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), APIs, and modern web stacks (e.g., React, Type Script, Node.js, Python)
- Experience building systems used by AI researchers or applied ML teams
- RLE becomes the default platform researchers use to train reinforcement learning workflows
- New domains (e.g., finance, legal, SWE) can be launched…
(If this job is in fact in your jurisdiction, then you may be using a Proxy or VPN to access this site, and to progress further, you should change your connectivity to another mobile device or PC).