Lead Research Engineer, Data Quality

Job description

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role owning the strategy and systems that measure, improve, and scale training data for frontier AI agents. You will sit at the intersection of research and engineering, leading a team that defines what high-quality agent training data looks like and building the infrastructure to enforce that bar at scale. The work directly shapes the post-training data that aligns AI models to real-world tasks.

WHAT YOU'LL DO - Lead the data quality team in building evaluation systems across RL environments, synthetic data, benchmarks, and domain-specific workflows. - Define data quality strategy by building QC systems, enforcing standards, and designing experiments to grade agent outputs. - Develop methods for validating synthetic data at scale, including failure-mode analysis, task mutation checks, and trajectory auditing. - Partner with research engineers, domain experts, and data vendors to diagnose quality issues and improve data generation workflows. - Translate qualitative research insights into production systems: validation pipelines, dashboards, internal tools, and feedback loops. - Help build internal research taste around what makes agent training data realistic, learnable, diverse, reliable, and genuinely useful. - Mentor research engineers to maintain a high bar for technical rigor, clarity, and execution speed.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 5+ years of experience in research or data quality engineering, specifically building systems for AI/ML data evaluation. - Demonstrated experience leading technical projects or teams in data quality or AI/ML evaluation, ideally on ambiguous, open-ended problems. - Advanced proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments. - Deep, research-oriented understanding of AI evals and post-training, beyond surface-level agent frameworks. - Experience building QC systems, benchmarks, synthetic data pipelines, validation workflows, or model evaluation infrastructure. - Ability to reason carefully about what makes training data high-quality for AI agents, not just technically valid. - Experience translating research insights into production pipelines and internal tooling. - Ability to collaborate with domain experts and data vendors, capturing expert judgment and converting it into scalable review or generation systems. - Strong written communication skills, with the ability to explain methodology clearly to researchers, engineers, and external stakeholders. - Comfort designing metrics, experiments, and QA/QC processes independently. - Early-stage startup experience and the ability to move quickly in fast-paced, resource-constrained environments. - Detail-oriented mindset with a sharp eye for subtle inconsistencies and edge cases in data.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

Salary range: $150,000 to $180,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

LOCATION

On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States. This role is not fully remote.