Frontier AI Research Scientist — Customer-Facing Impact

Snorkel AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Snorkel AI is hiring Forward Deployed Researchers who will partner with frontier AI labs on their most challenging data problems. This is a high-impact, customer-facing role that blends deep technical and research credibility with the ability to work directly with customer research teams.

You’ll partner with customer research teams to design complex data and environments that improve frontier model performance, serving as a thought partner throughout the engagement.

Qualifications

• Experience in frontier AI research and data engineering.
• Customer-facing or collaborative research experience, or demonstrated aptitude for client engagement.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to present complex concepts to diverse audiences.

Responsibilities

• Own a technical domain end-to-end: the technical bar for what we build in it, and what we build next.
• Partner with frontier AI research labs to design datasets and environments that improve model performance.
• Lead technical conversations with customer researchers to understand model capabilities, failure modes, data requirements, and success criteria.
• Probe model behavior through systematic evaluation to uncover weaknesses and identify high-impact data interventions.
• Benchmark frontier models against our datasets to demonstrate value to customers, building evaluation harnesses and pass-rate analysis.
• Design evaluation frameworks, calibration processes, and quality rubrics that establish measurable project success metrics.
• Develop technical specifications for data projects balancing research rigor with operational feasibility.
• Hold the demand shape for your domain and foresee what labs want, at what volume.
• Develop a point of view on domain direction and collaborate with Research on what should exist before customers ask for it.
• Serve as thought partner to customer research teams throughout the sales cycle, building trust and credibility.
• Stay current on frontier AI research, RL environment design, post-training techniques, and evaluation methodologies.

Skills

Frontier AI

LLMs

Training data pipelines

Evaluation methodologies

Post-training techniques

RLHF

DPO

RLAIF

Coding agents

Reasoning

Multimodal models

RL environments

Education

BS in CS/ML

4+ years experience

Advanced degree preferred

Tools

Python

ML frameworks

LLM APIs

Containerized environments

Job description

Snorkel AI is hiring Forward Deployed Researchers who will partner with frontier AI labs on their most challenging data problems. This is a high-impact, customer-facing role that blends deep technical and research credibility with the ability to work directly with customer research teams.

You’ll partner with customer research teams to design complex data and environments that improve frontier model performance, serving as a thought partner throughout the engagement.