MTS - Research
Company websitecollinear.ai (Collinear, opens in new tab)
Base salary $160K to $400K
Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in Sunnyvale, CA +1 more
You apply on the employer's own site. Six Figure Work does not handle applications.
- LocationSunnyvale, CA +1 more
- WorkplaceOn-site
- Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
- Last checked (9 min ago) · observed since
All places named
- Sunnyvale, CA
- San Francisco, CA
About this job
About Collinear
At Collinear, we help teams fearlessly ship AI.
About the Role
We are looking for MTS - Research team member to help us build the data engine for frontier AI. You will develop the high-fidelity environments and evaluation stacks that the world’s leading AI labs rely on to stress-test their most advanced agents. You will work across domains including Computer Use, Enterprise MCP/Toolcalling and Coding. Verifier Design, Simulated Personas, Benchmarking Personal AGI are some of the research areas we work on.
Responsibilities:
Build Agentic Environments: Design and implement the next generation of "SimLabs", ultra-realistic, long-horizon simulation environments where agents learn to navigate ambiguity and maintain context.
Programmatic and Agentic Verification: Develop rigorous, policy-aware judges and evaluations that measure genuine capability and safety beyond simple benchmarks.
Close the Loop: Design and execute high-quality post-training runs (CPT, SFT, RL) to deliver frontier performance on open-source models using curated, high-signal data.
Collaborate: Work daily with the founders and research staff to shape the roadmap and push the state-of-the-art in AI reliability.
Work on analyzing model failure modes and creating frontier data pipelines which scale with test-time compute.
About You
We are looking for individuals who demonstrate a rare combination of technical depth, research intuition, and high agency.
Technical Foundation: A Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in a technical field (CS, Math, Physics, etc.), or a demonstrated "proof of work" through significant open-source contributions or industry experience.
Engineering Rigor: A strong foundation in software engineering with the ability to build robust, scalable infrastructure. You should be comfortable in a Python-friendly, CLI-first development environment.
ML Fluency: A principled understanding of foundation models, including how they are constructed, evaluated, and optimized.
Empirical Mindset: Experience conducting research or technical experiments with a focus on reproducibility and data-driven results.
What will make you stand out
Research Taste: You have a strong intuition for identifying what matters in complex problem spaces. You can balance deep research exploration with the pragmatism needed to ship a product.
Impact-Driven Agency: You care about outcomes, not just activity. You don't wait for a ticket; you identify gaps in the system, build the solution, and ensure it moves real-world metrics for frontier AI labs.
Domain Expertise: Prior experience with Reinforcement Learning (RLHF/RLAIF), simulation systems, or building long-horizon agentic environments.
Proven Track Record: A history of contributing to influential ML research (e.g., publications at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML) or maintaining high-impact open-source projects.
Post-Training Experience: Experience fine-tuning or evaluating large-scale models to deliver "frontier performance" on open-source benchmarks.
Why Join Collinear
Own the Frontier: Work on the most pressing problem in AI today: making agents reliable enough for production.
High Density of Talent: Join a small, elite team where you will be pushed to do your life's work.
Elite Compensation: We offer competitive salary and equity packages to ensure we attract the best of the best.
Direct Impact: At a seed-backed startup, your work directly shapes the company's trajectory and the future of AI safety.
Collinear is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
The base salary range for this role in California is $160,000 to $400,000 per year, depending on experience, skills, and qualifications. This role will also be eligible for equity, benefits, and bonuses.
Collinear provides reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the application and hiring process. If you need an accommodation, please contact us.
Pursuant to applicable local ordinances, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Source: Collinear on Ashby · View original posting (opens in new tab)
Pay in context
This role's base floor ($160,000) is above 64% of the 1,164 Science & Research roles nationwide listed on this site; 8 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $145,000; the middle half runs from $120,000 to $172,344.
Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 7, 2026.
This listingMTS - Research$160K to $400K
MTS - Research (Robotics Simulation Data)$160K to $400K
MTS - Research (Kernels & Hardware RL)$160K to $400K
MTS - Product$150K to $400K
MTS - Engineering$150K to $300K
MTS - Staff Engineer$200K to $400K
Chart as a table
| Role | Published base |
|---|---|
| MTS - Research (this listing) | $160K - $400K |
| MTS - Research (Robotics Simulation Data) | $160K - $400K |
| MTS - Research (Kernels & Hardware RL) | $160K - $400K |
| MTS - Product | $150K - $400K |
| MTS - Engineering | $150K - $300K |
| MTS - Staff Engineer | $200K - $400K |
Observed changes
- First observed on the employer's board
- Began meeting the published-salary criteria
- Observed since
- Employer-stated posting date
- 2026-04-30
Where this pay comes from
Location as the employer wrote it: Sunnyvale, California • San Francisco, CA
USD 160,000 – 400,000 · 1 YEAR · Salary
- Method
- Structured pay field published by the employer
- Checked
- Rule set
- us-base-v2
The employer's job board publishes this pay as a dedicated data field. We read the field directly; no interpretation was needed.
What we verified
- The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
- The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
- The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.
We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.