Frontier AI Researcher: Customer-Facing Data & Eval

Fdetimes; New York, San Francisco (NY, CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental coverage

Equity grants

Job summary

Snorkel AI is hiring Forward Deployed Researchers to partner with frontier AI labs on challenging data problems. You will design datasets and environments to boost model performance while engaging directly with customer research teams.

You will scope data needs, design RL environments, develop evaluation frameworks, and translate customer objectives into actionable technical plans. This role blends research credibility with client-facing responsibilities.

Qualifications

• Strong expertise in frontier AI concepts including LLMs, training data pipelines, evaluation methodologies, post-training techniques (RLHF, DPO, RLAIF), and domain areas such as coding agents, reasoning, multimodal models, or RL environments.

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 or adapting evaluation harnesses as needed, and turn the results into pass-rate analysis, failure-mode breakdowns, and purchase recommendations.
• Design evaluation frameworks, calibration processes, and quality rubrics that establish measurable project success metrics.
• Develop technical specifications for data projects that balance research rigor with operational feasibility.
• Hold the demand shape for your domain: which labs want what, at what volume, against what bar, and where the asks are converging.
• Develop a point of view on where your domain is heading, and partner with Research on what should exist before a customer asks 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

Python

ML frameworks

LLM APIs

Data pipeline design

Communication

Ambiguity tolerance

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Containerized environments

Job description

Snorkel AI is hiring Forward Deployed Researchers to partner with frontier AI labs on challenging data problems. You will design datasets and environments to boost model performance while engaging directly with customer research teams.

You will scope data needs, design RL environments, develop evaluation frameworks, and translate customer objectives into actionable technical plans. This role blends research credibility with client-facing responsibilities.