Six Figure Work

Research Scientist / Engineer – Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure

Luma

Company websitelumalabs.ai (Luma, opens in new tab)

Base salary $195K  to $395K

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in Redwood City, CA +2 more

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  • LocationRedwood City, CA +2 more
  • WorkplaceHybrid
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (2 h ago) · observed since
All 4 locations
  • Redwood City, CA
  • Remote, US
  • New York, NY
  • Seattle, WA

About this job

You'll build the systems that make reinforcement learning work at frontier scale — coupling policy optimization with large fleets of inference workers, agentic environments, and the reward and verification systems that turn model behavior into learning signal. RL is how Luma's models go from capable to useful.

RL at scale is a full-loop systems problem: training, rollout generation, environment execution, and reward computation running concurrently across thousands of GPUs, all needing to stay fast, stable, and correct together. It fits someone who has lived this — post-trained LLMs with RL, built environments and verifiers, and debugged asynchronous rollout pipelines at scale. If you haven't operated RL at real scale, this will be deep water.

What You'll Own

  • Design, build, and scale distributed RL post-training systems, orchestrating trainer, rollout, environment, and reward workloads across thousands of GPUs.

  • Build high-throughput rollout generation, integrating inference engines (vLLM, SGLang), weight synchronization, and asynchronous/off-policy schemes.

  • Design RL environments for agentic, multi-step tasks — sandboxed code execution, tool use, computer use, multimodal interaction — reproducible and scalable to millions of episodes.

  • Build reward infrastructure: verifiable/programmatic rewards, reward-model serving, LLM-as-judge pipelines, and defenses against reward hacking.

  • Develop the evaluation, monitoring, and debugging tooling that keeps large RL runs stable.

  • Advance training efficiency and stability, and turn new post-training ideas into production runs with researchers.

First 90 Days

One way the first 90 could unfold.

  • Days 1–30 — Immerse & Diagnose: Learn the current RL stack and where throughput, stability, or correctness break.

  • Days 30–60 — Ship & Validate: Improve a piece of the loop (rollout throughput, reward infra, or an environment) and prove it on a real run.

  • Days 60–90 — Scale & Systemize: Harden the full loop across thousands of GPUs and asynchronous architectures.

What You Bring

  • Hands-on experience post-training LLMs with RL (PPO/GRPO-family, RLHF, RLVR) at meaningful scale.

  • Extensive distributed PyTorch training and parallelism (FSDP, Tensor/Pipeline/Expert Parallel) for foundation models.

  • Experience building RL environments, reward functions, verifiers, or evaluation harnesses for LLM agents, including sandboxed execution and multi-turn tool use.

  • Deep familiarity with RL post-training frameworks (veRL, OpenRLHF, TRL, Ray orchestration) and rollout inference engines (vLLM, SGLang).

  • Strong understanding of GPU clusters, networking, and communication libraries (NCCL, MPI) under mixed training and inference workloads.

Nice to Have

  • Running RL training across 100+ GPUs, including asynchronous or disaggregated trainer/rollout architectures.

  • Containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, Ray) for large environment fleets and sandboxed workloads.

  • Research contributions in RL for LLMs, or open-source contributions to RL training frameworks.

About Luma: Luma's mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. We believe multimodality is critical for intelligence — the next step beyond language models comes from vision. Luma is an equal opportunity employer.

Source: Luma on Ashby · View original posting (opens in new tab)

Pay in context

This role's base floor ($195,000) is above 56% of the 1,730 Data & ML roles in California listed on this site; 8 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $184,000; the middle half runs from $154,150 to $224,000.

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 range next to 5 other live Luma roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 5 other live Luma roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
Research Scientist / Engineer – Reinforcement Learning Infrastructure (this listing)$195K - $395K
Software Engineer, Inference$195K - $345K
Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure$170K - $360K
GTM Delivery Lead, North America$167K - $200K
Forward Deployed Creative [US]$145K - $205K
Editor + Motion Graphics$126K - $147K

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All Luma roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. First observed on the employer's board
  2. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-07-24
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: Multiple locations (4)

USD 195,000 – 395,000 · 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.

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