Research Engineer Jobs in San Francisco, CA
Research Engineer jobs in San Francisco concentrate in biotech, AI, and semiconductor hardware, with demand running highest in Mission Bay, SoMa, and the Financial District. Employers actively hiring include Anthropic, OpenAI, and HUD. Scan the live roles below and apply to whichever ones fit.
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Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
Hybrid
Department
Engineering
Compensation
- $230K – $340K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in our equity plan and benefits program. Benefits include, but not limited to: Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits (401k match up to 4%), and flexible PTO.
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 Notices here.
#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 accommodations@harvey.ai
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Find Research Engineer JobsResearch Engineer Job Market in San Francisco
Who's Hiring
- Anthropic50

- OpenAI31

- HUD29
- Together AI14

- MERCOR12

Top Industries Hiring
- Science & Research36
- Technology & Software31
- Artificial Intelligence10
- Banking & Financial Services2
- Biotechnology & Pharmaceuticals2
Research Engineer Jobs in San Francisco: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get a research engineer job in San Francisco?
Target San Francisco's strongest hiring clusters: biotech and life sciences firms anchored in Mission Bay, AI and machine learning labs in SoMa, and hardware and semiconductor companies in the broader Bay Area corridor. A portfolio of published research, open-source contributions, or a graduate degree from a Bay Area institution carries real weight here. Applying directly to a company's research team, rather than through a generic job board, tends to move faster in this market.
Which companies hire research engineers in San Francisco?
Companies currently hiring research engineers in San Francisco include Anthropic, OpenAI, and HUD, per current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. San Francisco's employer mix skews toward technology labs, biotech startups, and large enterprise research divisions, with a notable concentration of both early-stage and publicly traded firms actively building research headcount.
Are there remote research engineer jobs in San Francisco?
Yes, though availability depends heavily on the type of work: computational and software-focused research roles tend to be remote-friendly, while wet-lab, hardware, and instrumentation roles are almost always on-site. About 74% of research engineer openings tied to San Francisco are remote or hybrid as of November 2026. AI, data science, and modeling roles within San Francisco companies are the most likely to offer fully remote arrangements.
How can I get a research engineer job in San Francisco with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is through a graduate research role or a university lab partnership, given how closely San Francisco employers recruit from UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. Entry-level titles like associate research engineer or research associate are common at Mission Bay biotech firms and SoMa AI startups. Internship-to-hire pipelines at mid-size tech companies are another reliable route, and open-source project contributions can substitute for formal work history in software-heavy research teams.
Which industries hire the most research engineers in San Francisco?
Most research engineer openings in San Francisco sit in Science & Research, Technology & Software, and Artificial Intelligence, per current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. San Francisco's density of venture-backed biotech companies in Mission Bay and AI-focused technology firms in SoMa makes those two sectors the primary engines of local research engineering demand.
Related Jobs in California
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