AI tools, scored for your job
Get paid to train AI
Hiring now · posted today Science Full-time · Remote

Research Engineer / Scientist, Reinforcement Learning

at Harvey

$230,000–$340,000/yr

Salary range published by Harvey. Final pay depends on level and location.

Remote · Remote Language: English Posted 30 Oct 2026

About this role

Preparing for this role? See the best AI tools for data scientists, practise with ready-made prompts for data scientists, read Best ChatGPT for Excel Tools in 2026 and take the free 30-day AI challenge.

Why Harvey

At Harvey, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate. By combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise, we’re reshaping how critical knowledge work gets done for decades to come.

This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point. We have strong product-market fit and world-class investor support. We’re scaling fast and defining a new category in real time. The work is ambitious, the bar is high, and the opportunity for growth — personal, professional, and financial — is unmatched.

Our team moves fast, takes ownership, and is deeply committed to the mission — operating with intensity, staying close to our customers, and pushing each other for excellence. We live by three values: Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished. We act quickly on clear judgment over perfect information, we believe simplicity is what scales, and we're never satisfied with where we are. If you want to do the best work of your career alongside people who share that drive, we'd love to build with you.

At Harvey, the future of professional services is being written today — and we’re just getting started.

Role Overview

As a Member of Technical Staff, Modeling in Harvey Research, you’ll own how we adapt and improve leading open-weight models for legal work.

We recently post-trained our first model built for legal work, and we’re now building the team to scale up our post-training efforts. You’ll own the post-training recipe across SFT and RL, including reward design and verification for challenging, semi-verifiable legal tasks. You’ll help set the research direction and carry ideas from experiments through training runs to models used by customers. You’ll join a small, high-bar team of hands-on engineers and researchers, where each person owns a large part of the work.

We’re looking for research engineers and scientists who have gotten training runs working at scale, are immersed in RL for language models, and want their work to reach users quickly.

Learn more about our work at harvey.ai/research.

What You'll Do

  • Own and pursue a research agenda to improve model capability on long-horizon legal reasoning and agentic workflows.

  • Design and run post-training experiments across SFT and RL, building on leading open-weight models.

  • Develop reward functions and verifiers for semi-verifiable tasks, including rubrics, learned preference models, and expert preference data, and study where they break.

  • Run and debug training at scale, addressing divergence, reward hacking, and instability.

  • Build and use rigorous evals to track improvements and decide what ships.

  • Design, implement, test, and debug code across our research stack.

What You Have

  • Hands-on experience post-training LLMs with SFT and RL, including preference optimization, and direct ownership of training runs and results.

  • Deep ML fundamentals and experience getting distributed training runs working reliably.

  • Strong engineering skills in Python, with production-quality code and end-to-end system ownership.

  • Research experience in RL for language models or reward modeling, with the ability to move quickly from experiments to shipped improvements. Publications welcome, not required.

We are hiring for this role across multiple levels.

Compensation

$230,000 - $450,000 USD

Depending on your location, an Applicant Privacy Notice may apply to you. You can find all of our Applicant Privacy Noticeshere.

#LI-DZ1

Harvey is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made by emailing [email protected]

This is a remote role. Location as listed by Harvey: Remote.

How applying works

  1. Click Apply now and enter your email.
  2. You go straight to the application. We email you a copy of this role and your link.
  3. You apply on Harvey's own careers page. Zekai is not the employer and never charges you.
How to get this job

Your plan for “Research Engineer / Scientist, Reinforcement Learning”

Are you ready? Check what you have

Taken from this listing's own requirements.

0 / 4

What to know before you apply

Pay
This is a yearly figure, so it is closer to a full-time contract than a side gig. Check the expected weekly hours in the description before you apply.
Timing
This listing is new today. Projects can close once they have enough people, so it is worth applying while it is open.
How to stand out for data scientists
  • Mirror the job's own wording in your CV: reviewers and screening tools look for the skills listed above.
  • Show real work: a portfolio, GitHub, case study or numbers from past projects beats a long list of duties.
  • Show how you already use AI tools in your work. AI companies hire people who use their products well.
  • Apply early and follow up once, politely, if you hear nothing in two weeks.
Data Scientists

More paid AI roles for data scientists

Confidential clientAI training · Data Scientists

Agent Engineer

Top pay
  • Remote · United States
  • Contract · flexible hours

We are looking for engineers who build and operate LLM agents in production, and who have real visibility into how ag…

$100–$500/hr
79d ago
Confidential clientAI training · Data Scientists

Data Science Specialist

Top pay
  • Remote · United States, United Kingdom +1
  • Contract · flexible hours

Our partner is engaging Data Science Specialists to contribute to a customer's project focused on elevating the quali…

$150–$350/hr
35d ago
Confidential clientAI training · Data Scientists

Data Science Specialist

NewTop pay10 open
  • Remote · United States, United Kingdom +1
  • Contract · flexible hours

Our partner is engaging Data Science Specialists to contribute to a customer's project focused on elevating the quali…

$150–$350/hr
New today
Confidential clientAI training · Data Scientists

Applied Scientist

Top pay100 open
  • Remote · Worldwide
  • Contract · flexible hours

Our partner is engaging Applied Scientists to contribute to a customer's data-driven project, focusing on advanced an…

$245–$280/hr
15d ago
Confidential clientAI training · Data Scientists

Machine Learning Engineer Talent Network

Top pay
  • Remote · United States
  • Contract · flexible hours

Join our Machine Learning Engineer Expert Network to connect with leading AI labs and companies seeking your expertis…

$70–$250/hr
245d ago
new in the last 24 hours

New roles in your inbox every morning

Pick your field. One short email a day, only when new roles open. Unsubscribe any time.

Roles come from public listings and change daily. Pay is what the listing shows; offers depend on your test, experience and country. If you join through a Zekai link, the platform may pay Zekai a fee. Your pay stays the same.

$230,000–$340,000/yr
Get paid to train AI →

See Zekai first in Google