Research Engineer, Synthetic Data

Cursor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

SpaceXAI is seeking a Research Engineer for Synthetic Data to invent and scale datasets that teach models new capabilities. You own the full loop from idea to validated data production, building reliable pipelines and verifiers and confirming data improves model performance.

You will design diverse data recipes, run ablations, and collaborate with research and other RL Data teams to translate capability goals into concrete data plans.

Qualifications

• You have research experience on synthetic or post‑training data, in industry or academia.
• You have strong software engineering fundamentals and have built non‑trivial data pipelines, agent systems, or evaluation frameworks.
• You have taste for what makes a good training task: hard enough to teach something real, simple enough to grade reliably, and resistant to reward hacking.
• You are careful and systematic — understanding both aggregate metrics and close reading of raw outputs.
• You enjoy turning messy, open‑ended problems into repeatable, high‑quality data production systems.

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end synthetic data recipes that turn raw sources into large, diverse, verifiable task sets.
• Build verification and anti‑hacking mechanisms so rewards are simple to compute and hard to game.
• Control difficulty and diversity so data stays learnable and reflects real usage.
• Run targeted ablations and analyses that show a dataset improves capabilities and rule out data artifacts.
• Iterate from traces and training results to close gaps and turn successful recipes into reusable infrastructure.
• Partner with research and RL Data teams to translate model capability goals into concrete data plans.

Skills

Research experience

Software engineering fundamentals

Job description

Our mission is to automate coding. The first step in our journey is to build the best tool for professional programmers, using a combination of inventive research, design, and engineering. Our organization is very flat, and our team is small and talent dense. We particularly like people who are truth‑seeking, passionate, and creative. We enjoy spirited debate, crazy ideas, and shipping code.

Research Engineer, Synthetic Data

About the Role

As a Research Engineer on the Synth Data team at SpaceXAI, you’ll invent and scale the synthetic data that teaches our models new capabilities. You own the full loop: spotting a capability the model is missing, designing a data generation strategy, building reliable pipelines and verifiers, and validating that the resulting data actually moves the model.

You form hypotheses about what data will help, build the systems to produce it at scale, run ablations, and read the resulting traces and training signals to understand why it worked (or didn’t). Your datasets go directly into frontier training runs, and shape the development of Grok models.

What you’ll work on

• Designing end-to-end synthetic data recipes that turn raw sources (traces, documents, codebases, workflows) into large, diverse, verifiable task sets.

• Building strong verification and anti‑hacking mechanisms so rewards are simple to compute and hard to game.

• Controlling difficulty and diversity so data stays learnable and reflects real usage instead of collapsing into templates.

• Running targeted ablations and analyses that demonstrate a dataset caused a capability improvement (and ruling out grader or data artifacts).

• Iterating from traces and training results to close specific gaps, then turning successful one‑off recipes into reusable infrastructure.

• Partnering with research and other RL Data teams to translate model capability goals into concrete synthetic data plans.

You may be a fit if

• You have research experience on synthetic or post‑training data, in industry or academia. You've designed a data generation method, shipped the data into training, and can show its impact to the model you’re training.

• You have strong software engineering fundamentals and have built non‑trivial data pipelines, agent systems, or evaluation frameworks.

• You have taste for what makes a good training task: hard enough to teach something real, simple enough to grade reliably, and resistant to reward hacking.

• You are careful and systematic — understanding both aggregate metrics and close reading of raw outputs.

• You enjoy turning messy, open‑ended problems into repeatable, high‑quality data production systems.

Applying

If there appears to be a fit, we'll reach out to schedule 2‑3 short technicals. After, we'll schedule an onsite in our office, where you'll work on a small project, discuss ideas, and meet the team.