Research Lead, Open Benchmarks Grants

Snorkel AI • New York City, NY

2d

About The Position

Snorkel AI is seeking a Staff or Senior Research Scientist to collaborate with partners and lead the development of frontier benchmarks and datasets. This highly visible, customer-facing position sits at the intersection of research, company strategy, and go-to-market. The role involves designing datasets with frontier model performance in mind, collaborating with academic partners, and working with delivery, product, and go-to-market teams to scale research into production. The Research Lead also serves as a technical partner to customers and prospects and contributes to work that affects the broader research community. The role reports directly to the Head of Research and suits someone energized by cross-functional work and interested in how startups operate across research, data operations, and commercial teams.

Snorkel AI describes itself as a frontier AI data lab that combines technology and research-driven AI data development to create datasets, benchmarks, evaluations, and custom solutions for real-world AI systems. The company was founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019 and works with leading AI labs and enterprises.

Snorkel AI offers an environment in which employees can shape priorities and initiatives, influence strategic decisions, and develop technical expertise, leadership skills, and cross-functional capabilities. The company describes itself as rapidly scaling, with market-proven solutions and robust funding. It is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations during the application and interview process and for job functions and employment benefits.

Requirements

• Strong research background in AI/ML evaluation, NLP, or a related field.
• Track record of rigorous experimental design, particularly measuring the impact of training and evaluation data on model behavior.
• Exceptional communication skills and ability to explain complex technical findings to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfort working in a fast-moving, cross-functional environment with ambiguous problem spaces.
• Genuine interest in go-to-market strategy, startup dynamics, and the commercial side of AI data services.

Nice To Haves

• Ph.D. in machine learning, NLP, or a related field; equivalent industry or research lab experience is also considered.

Responsibilities

• Design state-of-the-art datasets that support frontier model training and evaluation, based on current model performance and academic partnerships.
• Translate benchmark insights into compelling narratives about the return on investment of expert-curated data for customer presentations, technical reports, and go-to-market materials.
• Collaborate with data operations, product, engineering, and strategy teams to surface research findings that inform the company roadmap.
• Stay current with frontier LLM evaluation research and bring best practices into Snorkel's workflows.
• Represent Snorkel's research through publications, blog posts, conference talks, and customer engagements, advancing discussion of data-centric AI.
• Collaborate with partners and academic partners on the development of benchmarks and datasets.
• Partner with delivery, product, and go-to-market teams to scale research into production.
• Serve as a technical partner for customers and prospects.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed