Push The Frontier of Your Career
Open roles
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.
ApplySpecial Projects Operators are responsible for the relationships and the operations that connect our network of experts to our data production. As an SPO, you will recruit, onboard, and manage our experts, and you will build the systems and tooling to automate your recruitment and management processes. This role is half project management, half engineering.
ApplyForward Deployed Engineers are heavily customer and partner-facing technical experts who own the entire system that turns our partners’ real work into evals & RL environments.
ApplyAs a Design Engineer at idler, you'll own the visual design and user experience for our customers and internal team. You'll be tasked with producing beautiful applications, pages, interactions, and marketing materials that are a delight to view and use. Our RL environments are novel, complex artifacts that need to be easy to interact with and communicated well. You'll need a founder’s high-level thinking, a designer's taste, and an engineer's precision to succeed.
ApplyAs a Research Scientist at idler, you'll own measuring and improving how models learn from our tasks. The job is to maximize learning signal we produce per unit time. You'll draw on your own experience and collaborate with researchers at the frontier to validate our data quality, identify where improvements are needed, and create new datasets. To succeed, you'll need to have extensive experience doing this work in production at a frontier lab.
ApplyA phenomenal Executive Assistant is uniquely observant and thoughtful. You notice what people need before they ask, and you take care of it in a way that makes them feel thought about. When you do this job well, the people around you spend their time on their work instead of on logistics.
ApplyAbout
idler is a frontier data lab. We focus on RL environments that teach economically valuable work. Long-horizon RL has been the high order bit powering frontier agentic AI advancements in LLM-based AI systems since 2025. Just 7k RL environments is enough to reach frontier performance.
Currently, we’re scaling our environment production across coding, RSI, law, cybersecurity, and enterprise use-cases. We expect to enter more domains as our capacity permits. We scale production of this data using a combination of technology and AI, rather than brute-forcing the problem with an enormous contractor workforce like companies such as Mercor. We’re working with several frontier labs to advance their model capabilities, and our work powers many models you know and love.
Last year, with a team of three people, we closed a multimillion dollar contract from a frontier lab, and raised a $9m seed round from Paradigm. Since then, our team grew to 14, and we’re on track to reach an 8-figure run-rate in the coming months.
Besides the opportunity to work at the frontier and join a rapidly growing business, working at idler uniquely empowers you to influence the direction of frontier AI capabilities. This is important because AI will soon entirely transform humanity, and the way this transformation will go depends on who is involved. We’d like to see this technology be developed for the benefit of humanity, so we’re looking to advance capabilities that democratize access to specialized knowledge, secure our nation against our adversaries, and improve quality of life of the general population.
We're growing rapidly, and looking for exceptionally talented people to join us across infrastructure, research, systems, and operations. Please apply!
Hiring FAQ
What work would I do or own in an engineering role?
Engineering at idler is fundamentally about creating systems and feedback loops for teaching and evaluating frontier models.
In practice, this work ranges from Internet-scale scraping and durable workflow orchestration to building quality control pipelines with 100+ steps and post-training models on our own data.
What are the steps and timeline of idler’s interview process?
For technical positions, see this document.
For non-technical roles, we have a custom process per-candidate.
Are you hiring interns?
Yes, but due to hiring team capacity, we are prioritizing full-time roles and interns who can start within the next 3 months.
Do you hire internationals and sponsor visas?
Yes. We consider international candidates and make a best effort to support work authorization and visa processes. We’re open to candidates on OPT and to eligible J-1, TN, and H-1B pathways.
Who is on the team, including the founders?
The idler founders are Ivan Chub, Nalu Concepcion, and Tony Goss. They went through Y Combinator’s S25 cohort and pivoted into RL in the final four weeks of the batch, securing a year-long contract building coding tasks for a top lab.
The idler team includes Ivy League computer science dropouts, compiler researchers, indie blockchain game developers, Yale Law School deferrals, quant interns, poetry contest winners, Platinum Computing Olympiad scorers and top-ranked Tetris players.
What kind of person is idler looking to hire?
A deeply technical, curious, and driven generalist with low ego and high self-confidence.
Is working in person in San Francisco required?
Yes.
What is idler’s biggest current challenge?
Growing our team to meet the skyrocketing data needs of our customers.
How long is the work trial, and can it fit around an existing job?
It’s two days. We prefer to do it during weekdays so you can meet more of the team, but weekends are acceptable if necessary.