Research Engineer - Data Pipelines for Foundation Models

AfterQuery; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance: Medical, Vision,/Dan

401(k) with Employer Match

Daily Meals: UberEats stipend

Monthly Wellness Stipend

Job summary

AfterQuery in San Francisco seeks a Research Engineer to design and run training experiments that quantify how datasets affect model behavior. You’ll own the end-to-end experiment loop from hypothesis to results, collaborating with partner labs and internal teams to convert data into defensible evidence.

You will build post-training infrastructure, orchestrate experiments, and ship reproducible pipelines across datasets, models, and training recipes.

Qualifications

• At least 2 years of professional experience in ML/IR or closely related field; 2-4+ years preferred.
• Strong Python and software-engineering skills.
• Hands on experience with PyTorch, JAX, Ray, and Slurm.
• Experience building production-quality ML training, evaluation, or data infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with LLM fine-tuning, post-training, and evaluation.
• Ability to build reliable, reproducible systems for launching and comparing ML experiments.
• Strong debugging skills across distributed systems and data pipelines.
• Understanding of experimental design and deriving actionable conclusions from noisy results.

Responsibilities

• Design and build post-training infrastructure for SFT, RL and evaluation workflows.
• Build reliable pipelines for data preparation, dataset versioning, sampling, training, checkpoint management, and evaluation.
• Develop experiment orchestration and tracking systems that are reproducible and debuggable.
• Create reusable abstractions to launch experiments quickly across datasets, models, and training recipes.
• Integrate systems with partner lab training stacks, model APIs, compute environments, and evaluation infra.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Software engineering

Experimentation

Debugging

Education

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Ray

Slurm

Job description

AfterQuery in San Francisco seeks a Research Engineer to design and run training experiments that quantify how datasets affect model behavior. You’ll own the end-to-end experiment loop from hypothesis to results, collaborating with partner labs and internal teams to convert data into defensible evidence.

You will build post-training infrastructure, orchestrate experiments, and ship reproducible pipelines across datasets, models, and training recipes.