Pre-Training Data Scientist — Data Curation & Quality

Thinking Machines Lab Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 350,000 - 475,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision benefits

Unlimited PTO

Paid parental leave

Relocation support

Job summary

Thinking Machines Lab Inc. in San Francisco calls for a pre-training researcher who blends research with data engineering to assemble the next generation of AI training datasets and data systems.

You will design methods for sourcing, curating, and analyzing data, and you will write production-grade code while collaborating across research and infrastructure teams to scale data processing and address privacy, safety, and licensing concerns.

Qualifications

• Proficiency in Python and a DL framework (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX), with experience debugging distributed training.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in CS, ML, Physics, Mathematics, or related discipline with strong theoretical and empirical grounding.
• Clarity in communication, the ability to explain complex technical concepts in writing.
• A strong grasp of probability, statistics, and ML fundamentals.
• Experience with curation, preprocessing, and analysis of large-scale text, code, or multimodal datasets.
• Prior experience in data engineering, dataset construction, or large-scale web data processing for ML models.
• Experience evaluating or improving training data quality and knowledge of data ethics, safety, and licensing for AI datasets.
• Contributions to open datasets, research publications, or data tooling.
• PhD in CS/ML/Physics/Math or equivalent industry research experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement techniques for curating, sourcing, and filtering large-scale text, code, and multimodal data.
• Develop data quality metrics and analysis to measure coverage, diversity, and representativeness across sources.
• Collaborate with research and infrastructure teams to scale data processing systems efficiently and reproducibly.
• Investigate and mitigate data risks, including privacy, safety, and licensing concerns, to ensure responsible and ethical data use.
• Continuously evaluate dataset improvements by analyzing their downstream effects on model learning and behavior.
• Publish and present research that moves the entire community forward. Share code, datasets, and insights that accelerate progress across industry and academia.

Skills

Python

DL frameworks

Communication

Probability and stats

Data curation

Data engineering

Data ethics & licensing

Open datasets/publications

PhD or equivalent experience

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

PhD in CS/ML/Physics/Math or equivalent

Job description

Thinking Machines Lab Inc. in San Francisco calls for a pre-training researcher who blends research with data engineering to assemble the next generation of AI training datasets and data systems.

You will design methods for sourcing, curating, and analyzing data, and you will write production-grade code while collaborating across research and infrastructure teams to scale data processing and address privacy, safety, and licensing concerns.