Software Engineer

idler

Job Details

Location
San Francisco, CA
Employment Type
Full-time
Location Type
On-site

About This Role

About the job About Idler

Idler is a frontier data research lab. We build the evals and environments that the world's leading frontier labs use to measure and train their models.

We closed on a multimillion-dollar contract with a top lab and raised a $9m seed round led by Paradigm. We are now facing more lab demand for our data than we can currently serve.

Teaching AI superhuman capabilities is a responsibility we take very seriously. Our training data comes from work that is rigorous, ethically produced, and grounded in real expertise.

About The Role

As a Software Engineer at idler, you’ll build the systems and infrastructure that our entire company relies on. You will solve open-ended, technical challenges with focus on performance, scale, and simplicity. In the era of AI-coding, systems-level thinking and attention to detail is more important than experience with a particular framework or language

Examples Of What You'll Do

  • Design and build scaleable systems that generate RL environments
  • Create agentic QA systems to validate environment quality and fairness
  • Work directly with AI researchers at leading labs to understand what makes training data effective
  • Handle petabyte scale ETL and orchestrate millions of concurrent jobs
  • Support new product lines as we expand beyond coding environments
  • Manage our security posture and compliance requirements

What We’re Looking For

  • 1-10 years of experience writing excellent production software (new grads OK)
  • Experience with full-stack applications in a popular programming language
  • A meticulous problem solver who creates robust systems under time pressure

Tech stack

Typescript, React, NodeJS, Postgres, Redis, Vercel, Cursor

Details

  • In-person in San Francisco
  • Competitive salary + meaningful equity
  • Free meals in office
  • Healthcare, 401(k), 15 days of PTO per year
  • Relocation assistance
  • Small, ambitious team

This is an in-person role in San Francisco. We're a tight-knit founding team and we play to win. Join us if you like to win too.