Research Scholar

AfterQuery; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

401(k) with Employer Match

Daily Meals: UberEats stipend

Monthly Wellness Stipend

Job summary

AfterQuery is seeking a Research Scholar to join our applied AI research team in San Francisco. You will work on foundational data solutions for foundation model development, collaborating with elite engineers and researchers.

You will define a focused project with mentorship, formulate research questions, design experiments, and contribute datasets or benchmarks. You may co‑author a paper and receive guidance and support throughout the semester.

Qualifications

• Must have an established publication record in a relevant field.
• Ability to participate in an ongoing research collaboration during the academic semester.
• Strong foundation in machine learning concepts and data-driven research.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a focused project with an AfterQuery research mentor.
• Formulate research questions, design rigorous experiments, and analyze results.

Skills

Publication record

Research collaboration

Education

Undergraduate/Graduate student in CS/ML/AI

Tools

Python

ML frameworks

Job description

About AfterQuery

AfterQuery is an applied research lab curating data solutions for foundation model development. We serve every frontier AI lab with the mission of delivering the best data to power the best models. In doing so, we can make expertise that once took a lifetime to build available to anyone who needs it.

Our customers are the ones building the foundation models themselves and our work sits directly in the loop of how those systems improve. This is a rare opportunity to join a company at a defining moment in AI. Forbes reported that we could be YC's fastest unicorn, reportedly raising at a $3.2 billion valuation. We're based in San Francisco and backed by leading investors including Altos Ventures, BoxGroup, and Y Combinator and angels from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Microsoft AI.

Why Apply

Massive Opportunity: Forbes reported that we could be YC's fastest unicorn, reportedly raising at a $3.2 billion valuation, and we're not slowing down.

Founding Impact: You will own and architect core infrastructure systems that power our platform from the ground up.

Equity & Growth: Competitive salary and meaningful equity. As we scale, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the engineering organization and lead major technical initiatives.

Strong Team: Our founding team has experience from Citadel Securities, Meta, Google, Silver Lake, and Morgan Stanley - work alongside world-class engineers and researchers.

The AfterQuery Research Scholar program is a semester-long collaboration for students pursuing ambitious, publishable work in one of AfterQuery’s focus areas:

• Data quality and data mix

• Post-training research, including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning

• Agent and foundation-model evaluation

• Public benchmarks in coding and specialized domains such as medicine, finance, law, and STEM

Projects are shaped around each scholar’s interests, with the goal of producing a joint publication. Scholars receive weekly mentorship and hands‑on support with engineering, datasets, human annotation, and compute resources. A cash award is provided if a jointly authored paper from the collaboration is accepted for publication.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a focused project with an AfterQuery research mentor, aligned with your interests and at least one core research area.

• Formulate research questions, design rigorous experiments, and analyze the results.

• Develop the datasets, methods, evaluations, or benchmark assets the project needs.

• Document methods and results clearly and work with AfterQuery’s research and engineering teams to make the work reproducible.

• Co‑author a paper and work toward publication.

Required Qualifications

• Full‑time undergraduate/master/PhD student with an established publication record

• Ability to participate in an ongoing research collaboration throughout the academic semester.

Preferred Qualifications

• Research publications at leading conferences or peer‑reviewed journals.

• Experience developing, publishing, or contributing to public benchmarks.

Company Benefits (For Eligible Employees):

• Health Insurance: Medical, Vision, Dental

• 401(k) with Employer Match

• Daily Meals: Daily UberEats Stipend

• Monthly Wellness Stipend

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to providing a workplace free from discrimination and harassment. Employment decisions are made without regard to legally protected characteristics under applicable federal, state, or local law.

We comply with applicable pay transparency requirements and provide compensation ranges based on the position, qualifications, experience, and other relevant factors. Reasonable accommodations are available to qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs, as required by law. This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of work performed and is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, qualifications, or working conditions associated with the position. We reserve the right to modify this job description as business needs change.