Frontier AI Data & Agent Environments Scientist

Snorkel; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 375,000; Full time

Job summary

Snorkel seeks a Research Scientist in San Francisco to advance how high-quality data and environments for AI agents are created. You will build and optimize pipelines that blend real-world data, automated generation, and expert input to scale frontier model performance gaps.

You will collaborate with domain experts, partners, and cross-functional teams to turn research into reliable production workflows and publish findings that shape the field.

Qualifications

• Strong research background in AI, ML, NLP, LLMs, or related fields, with experience developing and evaluating new methods.
• Experience building environments for AI agents in automated research, computer use, coding, or professional domain workflows.
• Experience with synthetic data generation, human in the loop workflows, reinforcement learning, agent environments, or model evaluation.
• Strong experimental design skills, including defining hypotheses and conducting ablations.
• Experience with software engineering best practices, e.g., clean coding, modular design, version control.
• Ability to collaborate with domain experts and translate their knowledge into concrete tasks, evaluation criteria, and repeatable workflows.
• Comfort with rapid iteration, ambiguous research questions, and moving ideas from experimentation into production.
• Ph.D. in machine learning, NLP, or a related field preferred; equivalent industry or research lab experience considered.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimize reusable pipelines that combine AI capabilities with expert judgment to accelerate data and agentic environment creation.
• Design and run rigorous experiments to validate proof-of-concept approaches, measure their impact on data quality, pipeline efficiency, and model performance, and communicate findings.
• Partner with engineering, data operation, domain experts, and customers to turn research prototypes into reliable production workflows.
• Work directly with domain experts to design and test workflows that help them author, review, and refine data and environments.
• Work cross-functionally with data operations, product, and engineering to surface research findings that inform the company roadmap.
• Stay at the frontier of research in data and agentic environment creation and bring best practices into Snorkel’s workflows.
• Represent Snorkel’s research externally through publications, blog posts, conference talks, and customer engagements that advance the conversation around data-centric AI.

Skills

AI/ML research

Environments for AI agents

Synthetic data generation

Reinforcement learning

Experiment design

Software engineering practices

Collaboration with domain experts

Rapid iteration

Education

Ph.D. in machine learning/NLP or related field

Tools

Version control

Modular design

Code quality practices

Job description

Snorkel seeks a Research Scientist in San Francisco to advance how high-quality data and environments for AI agents are created. You will build and optimize pipelines that blend real-world data, automated generation, and expert input to scale frontier model performance gaps.

You will collaborate with domain experts, partners, and cross-functional teams to turn research into reliable production workflows and publish findings that shape the field.