Forward Deployed Research Scientist
$200k - $300k • Remote • San Francisco Bay Area
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco Bay Area
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
Alignerr, Labelbox's human data organization, is seeking a Forward Deployed Research Scientist to join their team. This role sits at the intersection of research science and client delivery, embedding research capability directly into client engagements. Unlike traditional research roles, you will work on multiple client projects simultaneously, operating on short timescales of days to weeks. You will engage with research teams at major AI labs, reason scientifically about data strategy in real time, fine-tune open-weight models to validate data methodology, and collaborate with the Applied Research team on publications. This fast-paced, applied role offers clear ownership and autonomy, with career growth directly tied to your contributions.
Responsibilities
- Engage directly with frontier lab research teams as a technical peer in scoping meetings.
- Shape project specifications by challenging assumptions about data requirements and methodology.
- Develop a deep scientific understanding of client engagements, including their architecture and training methodology.
- Reason about data strategy effectiveness and identify risks with empirical grounding.
- Run ablation studies and fine-tune open-weight models on client and proxy data to measure performance impact.
- Consult on workflow and quality systems, ensuring annotation schemas and task designs meet technical requirements.
- Collaborate with the Applied Research team on publications, benchmarks, and white papers by feeding them signal from the field.
Requirements
- MS or PhD in Machine Learning, NLP, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field.
- Hands-on experience fine-tuning large language models (e.g., Llama, Mistral, Qwen).
- Strong understanding of LLM training pipelines (pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, RLHF/DPO) and data's impact.
- Experience designing and executing rigorous experiments, including hypothesis formation and statistical analysis.
- Ability to operate at speed, moving from problem definition to experimental results in days.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills for presenting findings and contributing to publications.