Roles at frontier labs · Research
Member of Technical Staff
93 recorded postings · Partial update · October 8, 2026
Recorded postings, not a live vacancy count. Partial update: some sources retain earlier observations; each listing has its own check date.
Member of technical staff is the single engineering and research title some labs use for everyone, from model training to product. What the job is depends on the team named after the title.
- How language models work 60%
- Inference and serving 51%
- Evals and benchmarks 48%
- Python 45%
- Production systems 43%
- Post-training and fine-tuning 39%
taught here course coming not taught
The numbers
- Recorded postings at 9 labs
- 93
- Median base pay middle half $310k to $390k, 23 U.S. bands
- $310k
- No degree requirement stated 3% require a PhD outright
- 89%
- Years asked, median of the 14 that state a minimum
- 5
The recorded snapshot
Postings from 9 labs
In the labs' own words
In the labs' own words
“Solid understanding of how data quality impacts training (SFT and RL) and evaluation, with the ability to translate quality concerns into concrete signals, decisions, and feedback”
“[Bonus] Experience in ML, LLM and RL academic research.”
“Experience in SFT, RL, evals, human/synthetic data collection, or agentic systems.”
Your way in
Three doors to this role
- Door 1
Finishing a degree
23% mention publications
The way in is a program: 32 recorded in the snapshot
- Door 2
A software engineer
89% have no degree requirement stated
What to add
- Door 3
A PhD
23% ask for distributed training
Engineering at scale
Asked often
The short answers
How much does a member of technical staff at a frontier lab make?
The median U.S. base salary across 23 recorded member of technical staff postings that publish a band is $310k; the middle half runs from $310k to $390k. Equity and bonus are not included.
Do you need a PhD to be a member of technical staff?
89% of the 93 recorded postings do not state a degree requirement, 10% mention a PhD or master's, and 3% require a PhD outright.
What skills do member of technical staff postings ask for?
Most often: how language models work (60%), inference and serving (51%), evals and benchmarks (48%), python (45%), production systems (43%).
Which labs posted member of technical staff roles in this recorded board?
Recorded board: Reflection AI (27), Cohere (19), xAI (13), Liquid AI (12), Reka (6), Magic (5), and 3 more.
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The board
Recorded postings, newest first
The newest 40 of 93. Each title opens the lab's own posting. By family: ml systems and infrastructure · research scientists and engineers · machine learning engineers · software engineering at labs · applied ai and forward-deployed
- Member of Technical Staff, ML Platform ↗
Runway · ML systems and infrastructure · No degree stated · $240k to $290k base
- Member of Technical Staff, Cyberforensics ↗
METR · Software engineering at labs · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Embedded Assessments ↗
METR · Software engineering at labs · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Evaluation Execution ↗
METR · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff (Platform Leaning) ↗
Tessl · Software engineering at labs · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - Software Engineer ↗
Tessl · Software engineering at labs · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff- Research Engineer (Harness Engineering and Agentic Orchestration) ↗
Tessl · Research scientists and engineers · PhD preferred
- Lead Member of Technical Staff, Inference Infrastructure ↗
Cohere · ML systems and infrastructure · No degree stated · $235k to $325k base
- Member of Technical Staff - RL Environments ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - Sovereign AI ↗
Cohere · Machine learning engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Agent Code ↗
Cohere · Software engineering at labs · PhD required
- Member of Technical Staff, Agentic Environments ↗
Cohere · Software engineering at labs · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Data Analysis and Evaluation ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Integration/RL Team (Research Engineer) ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Model Efficiency ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Modeling ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Multilingual ↗
Cohere · Software engineering at labs · PhD or equivalent experience
- Member of Technical Staff, North Modeling (Evals) ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Post-Training ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Pre-Training Data ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Training Infra Engineer ↗
Cohere · ML systems and infrastructure · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Training Performance Engineer ↗
Cohere · ML systems and infrastructure · No degree stated
- Senior Member of Technical Staff, Multimodal AI ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Senior Member of Technical Staff, Safety and Security for Agents ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Senior Member of Technical Staff, Synthetic Data ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Senior Member of Technical Staff, Web Data ↗
Cohere · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - Inference Systems ↗
Liquid AI · ML systems and infrastructure · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - Applied ML, Japanese Multimodal ↗
Liquid AI · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - Applied ML, RecSys ↗
Liquid AI · Machine learning engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - Distributed Training Engineer ↗
Liquid AI · ML systems and infrastructure · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - GPU Infrastructure Engineer ↗
Liquid AI · ML systems and infrastructure · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - GPU Performance Engineer ↗
Liquid AI · ML systems and infrastructure · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - ML Research Engineer, Data ↗
Liquid AI · Research scientists and engineers · PhD required
- Member of Technical Staff - ML Scientist, Japanese Multimodal ↗
Liquid AI · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - Multi-Modal, Audio ↗
Liquid AI · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - Post Training, Applied ↗
Liquid AI · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - Post Training, Applied (Audio) ↗
Liquid AI · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff - Post Training, Applied (Vision) ↗
Liquid AI · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated
- Member of Technical Staff, Inference & RL Systems ↗
Magic · Research scientists and engineers · No degree stated · $275k to $550k base
- Member of Technical Staff, Kernels ↗
Magic · ML systems and infrastructure · No degree stated · $275k to $550k base
