[Remote] Research Engineer, Coding Evaluation & Training Data

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Surge AI is focused on building the next generation of AI with a mission to raise AGI with human-like intelligence. The Research Engineer, Coding Evaluation & Training Data role involves owning end-to-end coding data projects and designing workflows that reflect real-world software engineering tasks.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end coding data projects, from initial scoping and pilot design through execution, iteration, and scale-up
• Design agentic training workflows and task structures that mirror real-world SWE work (e.g., refactoring, debugging, code review, large-repo navigation, tool use)
• Define and iterate on rubrics, golden sets, and reward signals that capture true engineering value, not just 'does it compile.'
• Evaluate data and worker output with strong SWE taste, and make calls about what meets the bar for frontier training
• Design and run qualification processes for coding workers, including hands-on assessments of their coding ability
• Set up or partner on complex technical environments (e.g., containers, repos, test harnesses, sandboxes, code execution infrastructure)
• Partner with technical staff at our clients to translate high-level training goals into concrete projects and technical environments
• Collaborate closely with Surge engineering, product, and operations to improve our coding data products, internal tools, and execution processes

Skills

• 3–6+ years of professional software engineering experience building and maintaining real systems
• Strong coding ability in at least one mainstream language and comfort working in production codebases
• High “taste” for good engineering: you care about correctness, code quality, and how real engineering teams actually work
• Ability to reason about and debug technical environments, including containers, dependencies, and automated test setups
• Interest in owning projects end-to-end, including scoping, workflow design, execution, and continuous improvement
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to speak credibly with senior client engineers and translate fuzzy goals into actionable plans
• Excitement about AI/ML systems and the role of data, evaluation, and reward design in improving agentic coding capabilities

Company Overview

Surge AI is the world's most powerful data labeling platform for NLP. It was founded in 2020, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with a workforce of 51-200 employees. Its website is https://www.surgehq.ai.

Company H1B Sponsorship

Surge AI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 1 in 2025. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.