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Toy Design Jobs in Raleigh, NC (NOW HIRING)

Toy Design information

See Raleigh, NC salary details

$12

$24

$37

How much do toy design jobs pay per hour?

As of Jul 2, 2026, the average hourly pay for toy design in Raleigh, NC is $24.04, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $18.80 and $27.26 per hour, depending on experience, location, and employer.

Can you get a degree in toy design?

Toy design is a specialized field that can be pursued through degrees in industrial design, product design, or toy design programs offered by some art and design schools. These programs typically include coursework in sketching, prototyping, and materials, and may also require skills in CAD software and understanding of manufacturing processes.

What is a Toy Design job?

A Toy Design job involves creating and developing toys that are fun, safe, and engaging for children or collectors. Designers sketch concepts, create prototypes, and collaborate with engineers, marketers, and manufacturers to bring their ideas to life. They consider factors like materials, safety regulations, and play value to ensure the toy’s success. Toy designers often work for toy companies, entertainment brands, or as independent creators.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive in the Toy Design position, and why are they important?

To thrive as a Toy Designer, you need a solid background in industrial design, product development, and an understanding of child psychology or early childhood development. Familiarity with CAD software, 3D modeling programs, rapid prototyping tools, and relevant safety standards is often required. Creativity, attention to detail, and effective collaboration skills help you stand out in this team-oriented, innovation-driven field. These competencies are crucial for creating engaging, safe, and commercially viable toys that appeal to both children and parents.

What is a Toy Designer called?

A toy designer is a professional who creates and develops new toy concepts, often working with sketches, prototypes, and 3D modeling tools. They typically have skills in art, engineering, and understanding of safety standards to ensure the toys are appealing and safe for children.

How much does a Toy Designer get paid?

Toy designers typically earn a median annual salary of around $50,000 to $70,000, depending on experience, location, and company size. Entry-level positions may start lower, while experienced designers or those working for major toy companies can earn higher salaries and benefits. Skills in CAD software and prototyping can influence earning potential.

What does a typical day look like for a Toy Designer, and how do they collaborate with other teams?

A typical day for a Toy Designer involves sketching new concepts, creating digital models, and preparing prototypes for testing and presentation. Designers regularly collaborate with engineers, marketers, and child development experts to refine products for safety, usability, and market appeal. Participation in brainstorming sessions, user testing, and feedback reviews is common. This collaborative and iterative process ensures that the final toy design is both innovative and aligned with business goals.

Can you become a Toy Designer without a degree?

Toy designers typically do not require a formal degree, but having a background in art, design, or engineering can be beneficial. Strong skills in sketching, 3D modeling, and knowledge of toy safety standards are important for success in this field.
What are the most commonly searched types of Toy Design jobs in Raleigh, NC? The most popular types of Toy Design jobs in Raleigh, NC are:
Infographic showing various Toy Design job openings in Raleigh, NC as of June 2026, with employment types broken down into 92% Full Time, 5% Part Time, and 3% Contract. Highlights an 94% Physical, 3% Hybrid, and 3% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $49,999 per year, or $24 per hour.
Research Engineer - Post-Training & Small Language Models (SLMs), Healthcare AI

Research Engineer - Post-Training & Small Language Models (SLMs), Healthcare AI

Deloitte

Raleigh, NC

Other

Posted 24 days ago


Deloitte rating

8.0

Company rating: 8.0 out of 10

Based on 89 frontline employees who took The Breakroom Quiz

71st of 146 rated financial services


Job description

Three hundred fifty million Americans rely on a healthcare system whose decision-making has become slow, costly, and adversarial - care delayed by prior authorization and paperwork, claims that misfire, clinical decisions made without the right information at the right moment, and patients who struggle to navigate or afford the care they need. Deloitte has a new AI-first effort,, backed by $1B in committed investment, building the reasoning models and agentic systems to rebuild how that system decides - across payers, providers, and life sciences, and for the patients they serve - so that care is faster, fairer, and far less wasteful. This is not AI applied at the margins. It is a ground-up rebuild of the decision-making machinery behind American healthcare, at national scale.

This is resourced to do real post-training at scale - committed investment in GPU compute and training infrastructure, not toy fine-tunes.

As a Research Engineer on our post-training team, you will design, train, evaluate, and align the models that reason about healthcare - working across the full post-training lifecycle to shape model behavior for clinical and operational decisioning across the industry. Healthcare decisioning is one of the cleanest verifiable-reward domains outside math and code: the problems are hard. We ground that reward in real signals - clinical policy and criteria, adjudicated outcomes, and clinical-expert judgment - so correctness is checkable rather than asserted.

You will own the post-training stack for our clinical reasoning models end to end - from data and reward design through trained, evaluated models that ship. This is not a prompt-engineering role. We are looking for people who understand not just how to use LLMs, but how to improve and shape model behavior through advanced post-training.

You do not need a healthcare background. We pair every engineer with clinical and domain experts and teach you the domain - you bring the modeling depth.

We hire on demonstrated depth, not years - the level you join at is determined through our interview process, based on the depth and judgment you demonstrate, not your years in a title.

Work you'll do

Post-training & alignment

Design and execute post-training pipelines: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, and reinforcement learning / alignment workflows.

Build and optimize training using techniques such as SFT, RLHF, PPO, DPO, GRPO, RLAIF, and Constitutional AI, and understand how each affects reasoning quality, safety, latency, cost, and reliability.

Train reasoning models for healthcare decisioning using verifiable-reward RL - designing reward signals and verifiers grounded in clinical guidelines, policy and criteria, and adjudicated outcomes.

Reward modeling & data

Develop reward models and preference datasets to improve reasoning quality, factuality, safety, policy adherence, and task performance.

Curate, clean, synthesize, and evaluate large-scale instruction, preference, and domain-specific datasets, with rigorous filtering, deduplication, and quality control.

Build verification and reward pipelines from our proprietary clinical, claims, and operational data and from clinical-expert labeling - turning guidelines, policy, and adjudicated outcomes into checkable reward signals at scale.

Efficient fine-tuning, training & inference infrastructure

Implement efficient fine-tuning strategies including LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, and adapter-based approaches; build scalable distributed training using DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron-LM, Ray, or equivalent.

Optimize inference performance - latency, throughput, quantization, and deployment efficiency - for production, including frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or TGI.

Small language models & open-weight models

Train and optimize open-weight models such as Llama, Qwen, Mistral, or DeepSeek; build specialized small language models (SLMs) for on-premise and cloud-hybrid deployment with strong performance-per-dollar.

Evaluation, safety & red teaming

Design evaluation frameworks covering reasoning, hallucination detection, factuality, instruction following, structured outputs, and domain-specific metrics.

Build healthcare-grade evaluation - held-out clinical benchmarks, deployment regression gates, calibration and uncertainty, factuality against ground truth, and bias/fairness evaluation across patient populations and subgroups - co-designed with clinical experts.

Apply PHI/HIPAA-aware data handling and produce model documentation suitable for regulated clinical use.

Perform red teaming and adversarial testing to identify alignment failures, unsafe behaviors, jailbreak vulnerabilities, and regression risks; collaborate with agentic and application teams to improve tool use, grounding, and long-horizon reasoning.

The team

Deloitte brings together AI researchers, modeling and platform engineers, architects, clinical and domain specialists, and product leaders to build, deploy, and operate verticalized AI systems across software, data, models, and cloud infrastructure - engineered for one of the most complex operating environments in the world. The work spans the healthcare industry - payers, providers, and life sciences - and involves genuinely hard reasoning problems, nuanced operational workflows, and a high bar for reliability, with little tolerance for shallow or unreliable outputs. We pair frontier AI research with production-grade engineering, and we ship into real clinical and operational settings rather than leaving models in the lab.

You can go deep. The team sub-specializes across post-training research, data and reward engineering, and training and inference infrastructure - you won't be expected to own all of it alone.

Required qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Applied Mathematics, Computational Linguistics, or a related field.

Demonstrated depth training and post-training large transformer-based language models in production or research - this is your craft, not coursework or a one-off fine-tune. Genuine depth including SFT and at least one preference-optimization or RL method, evidenced by shipped models, releases, or research.

Hands-on experience with reasoning-model training and/or verifiable-reward (RLVR) workflows.

Strong understanding of modern post-training techniques: SFT, RLHF, PPO, DPO, GRPO, RLAIF, and preference optimization workflows.

Experience with open-weight foundation models such as Llama, Qwen, Mistral, DeepSeek, or equivalent architectures.

Strong expertise in PyTorch and modern deep-learning tooling; experience with distributed training frameworks such as DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron-LM, or Ray.

Experience implementing efficient fine-tuning techniques such as LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, and quantization-aware workflows.

Deep understanding of transformer architectures, tokenization, attention mechanisms, decoding strategies, and model scaling trade-offs.

Strong grasp of LLM evaluation methodologies, benchmarking, reward modeling, and alignment trade-offs; experience with large-scale and synthetic datasets, filtering, deduplication, and quality-control pipelines.

Strong Python engineering skills and production-grade software practices; ability to work through ambiguous, highly complex technical problems in fast-moving environments.

Ability to travel 0-50%, on average, based on the work you do and the clients and industries/sectors you serve.

Limited immigration sponsorship may be available.

Preferred qualifications

Experience building or optimizing reasoning models, agentic models, or tool-using LLM systems.

Familiarity with inference optimization frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, TGI, or Ollama.

Experience with multimodal models, speech models, or domain-specific foundation models; experience using large-scale GPU clusters and distributed compute.

Contributions to open-source AI projects, research publications, benchmark development, or model releases.

Familiarity with safety, governance, and responsible-AI practices; experience in regulated or high-stakes industries such as healthcare, finance, insurance, or public sector.

Compensation

Base salary is benchmarked to leading technology companies rather than traditional consulting scales, and the role carries a substantial performance-based incentive opportunity designed to grow with the value you help create - startup-style upside, with the backing of a committed, well-capitalized platform. The estimated base salary range is $110,700-$379,200 (not adjusted for geographic differential); actual base pay depends on your skills, experience, and level, and you may also be eligible for a discretionary annual incentive based on individual and organizational performance.


Qualifications:

Three hundred fifty million Americans rely on a healthcare system whose decision-making has become slow, costly, and adversarial - care delayed by prior authorization and paperwork, claims that misfire, clinical decisions made without the right information at the right moment, and patients who struggle to navigate or afford the care they need. Deloitte has a new AI-first effort,, backed by $1B in committed investment, building the reasoning models and agentic systems to rebuild how that system decides - across payers, providers, and life sciences, and for the patients they serve - so that care is faster, fairer, and far less wasteful. This is not AI applied at the margins. It is a ground-up rebuild of the decision-making machinery behind American healthcare, at national scale.

This is resourced to do real post-training at scale - committed investment in GPU compute and training infrastructure, not toy fine-tunes.

As a Research Engineer on our post-training team, you will design, train, evaluate, and align the models that reason about healthcare - working across the full post-training lifecycle to shape model behavior for clinical and operational decisioning across the industry. Healthcare decisioning is one of the cleanest verifiable-reward domains outside math and code: the problems are hard. We ground that reward in real signals - clinical policy and criteria, adjudicated outcomes, and clinical-expert judgment - so correctness is checkable rather than asserted.

You will own the post-training stack for our clinical reasoning models end to end - from data and reward design through trained, evaluated models that ship. This is not a prompt-engineering role. We are looking for people who understand not just how to use LLMs, but how to improve and shape model behavior through advanced post-training.

You do not need a healthcare background. We pair every engineer with clinical and domain experts and teach you the domain - you bring the modeling depth.

We hire on demonstrated depth, not years - the level you join at is determined through our interview process, based on the depth and judgment you demonstrate, not your years in a title.

Work you'll do

Post-training & alignment

Design and execute post-training pipelines: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, and reinforcement learning / alignment workflows.

Build and optimize training using techniques such as SFT, RLHF, PPO, DPO, GRPO, RLAIF, and Constitutional AI, and understand how each affects reasoning quality, safety, latency, cost, and reliability.

Train reasoning models for healthcare decisioning using verifiable-reward RL - designing reward signals and verifiers grounded in clinical guidelines, policy and criteria, and adjudicated outcomes.

Reward modeling & data

Develop reward models and preference datasets to improve reasoning quality, factuality, safety, policy adherence, and task performance.

Curate, clean, synthesize, and evaluate large-scale instruction, preference, and domain-specific datasets, with rigorous filtering, deduplication, and quality control.

Build verification and reward pipelines from our proprietary clinical, claims, and operational data and from clinical-expert labeling - turning guidelines, policy, and adjudicated outcomes into checkable reward signals at scale.

Efficient fine-tuning, training & inference infrastructure

Implement efficient fine-tuning strategies including LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, and adapter-based approaches; build scalable distributed training using DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron-LM, Ray, or equivalent.

Optimize inference performance - latency, throughput, quantization, and deployment efficiency - for production, including frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or TGI.

Small language models & open-weight models

Train and optimize open-weight models such as Llama, Qwen, Mistral, or DeepSeek; build specialized small language models (SLMs) for on-premise and cloud-hybrid deployment with strong performance-per-dollar.

Evaluation, safety & red teaming

Design evaluation frameworks covering reasoning, hallucination detection, factuality, instruction following, structured outputs, and domain-specific metrics.

Build healthcare-grade evaluation - held-out clinical benchmarks, deployment regression gates, calibration and uncertainty, factuality against ground truth, and bias/fairness evaluation across patient populations and subgroups - co-designed with clinical experts.

Apply PHI/HIPAA-aware data handling and produce model documentation suitable for regulated clinical use.

Perform red teaming and adversarial testing to identify alignment failures, unsafe behaviors, jailbreak vulnerabilities, and regression risks; collaborate with agentic and application teams to improve tool use, grounding, and long-horizon reasoning.

The team

Deloitte brings together AI researchers, modeling and platform engineers, architects, clinical and domain specialists, and product leaders to build, deploy, and operate verticalized AI systems across software, data, models, and cloud infrastructure - engineered for one of the most complex operating environments in the world. The work spans the healthcare industry - payers, providers, and life sciences - and involves genuinely hard reasoning problems, nuanced operational workflows, and a high bar for reliability, with little tolerance for shallow or unreliable outputs. We pair frontier AI research with production-grade engineering, and we ship into real clinical and operational settings rather than leaving models in the lab.

You can go deep. The team sub-specializes across post-training research, data and reward engineering, and training and inference infrastructure - you won't be expected to own all of it alone.

Required qualifications

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