{"id":127881,"url":"https://alion.io/job/labelbox-forward-deployed-research-scientist","title":"Forward Deployed Research Scientist","company":{"id":48105,"name":"Labelbox","domain":"labelbox.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/labelbox","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":86,"open_postings":7,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.571,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":200000,"max":300000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":300000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"DPO","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Llama","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Mistral","optional":false},{"name":"NLP","optional":false},{"name":"Qwen","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reward Modeling","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-04-13T23:17:35Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-01","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T21:38:02Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":185,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":185},"description":"Shape the Future of AI\nAt Labelbox, we're building the critical infrastructure that powers breakthrough AI models at leading research labs and enterprises. Since 2018, we've been pioneering data-centric approaches that are fundamental to AI development, and our work becomes even more essential as AI capabilities expand exponentially.\nAbout Labelbox\nWe're the only company offering three integrated solutions for frontier AI development:\nEnterprise Platform & Tools: Advanced annotation tools, workflow automation, and quality control systems that enable teams to produce high-quality training data at scale\nFrontier Data Labeling Service: Specialized data labeling through Alignerr, leveraging subject matter experts for next-generation AI models\nExpert Marketplace: Connecting AI teams with highly skilled annotators and domain experts for flexible scaling\nWhy Join Us\nHigh-Impact Environment: We operate like an early-stage startup, focusing on impact over process. You'll take on expanded responsibilities quickly, with career growth directly tied to your contributions.\nTechnical Excellence: Work at the cutting edge of AI development, collaborating with industry leaders and shaping the future of artificial intelligence.\nInnovation at Speed: We celebrate those who take ownership, move fast, and deliver impact. Our environment rewards high agency and rapid execution.\nContinuous Growth: Every role requires continuous learning and evolution. You'll be surrounded by curious minds solving complex problems at the frontier of AI.\nClear Ownership: You'll know exactly what you're responsible for and have the autonomy to execute. We empower people to drive results through clear ownership and metrics.\nRole Overview\nAlignerr is Labelbox's human data organization - we produce the training data that frontier AI labs use to build their most capable models. Our Forward Deployed Research Team sits at the intersection of research science and client delivery, embedding research capability directly into the engagements that drive our business.\nThis is not a traditional research scientist role. You will not spend months pursuing a single research question. You will work on multiple client engagements simultaneously, operating on timescales of days to weeks. You will sit in scoping meetings with research teams at major AI labs, reason scientifically about data strategy in real time, fine-tune open-weight models to validate our data methodology, and collaborate with our Applied Research team to turn client-grounded findings into published work. The pace is fast, the problems are applied, and the feedback loops are short.\nWe are looking for someone who finds that energizing, not compromising.\nYour Impact\nEngage directly with frontier lab research teams. You will be in the room during client scoping meetings - not as support staff, but as a technical peer. You'll engage on methodology, challenge assumptions about data requirements, and shape project specifications based on a scientific understanding of how data composition affects model outcomes.\nDevelop deep scientific understanding of client engagements. For each project, you will build a working model of the client's architecture, training methodology, and target capabilities. You'll use this understanding to reason about why a particular data strategy will or won't work, identify risks early, and iterate with empirical grounding - not intuition.\nRun ablation studies and fine-tune open-weight models. You will fine-tune models on client data (and proxy data) to empirically measure the impact of our data on model performance. This is how we validate that what we deliver actually improves our customers' models - and how we catch problems before the client does.\nConsult on workflow and quality systems. You will partner with our Human Data Operations team to review annotation schemas, task designs, and quality rubrics before projects go into execution. Your job is to ensure the spec is technically sound - that the data we produce will actually serve the client's training objectives.\nCollaborate with Applied Research on publications and benchmarks. Our Applied Research team owns the long-horizon research agenda. Your role is to feed them signal from the field - generalizable findings, reusable methodologies, empirical results - and help drive joint projects to completion. You will contribute to benchmarks, white papers, and conference submissions that establish Labelbox's research credibility.\n\nWhat You Bring\nRequired\nMS or PhD in Machine Learning, NLP, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field.\nHands-on experience fine-tuning large language models (open-weight models such as Llama, Mistral, Qwen, or similar).\nStrong understanding of LLM training pipelines - pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, RLHF/DPO, and how data quality and composition affect each stage.\nExperience designing and executing experiments with rigor - hypothesis formation, controlled comparisons, statistical analysis of results.\nAbility to operate at speed. You should be comfortable going from problem definition to experimental results in days, not months.\nStrong written and verbal communication. You will present findings to client research teams and contribute to published work.\nStrongly Preferred\nPrior experience at a frontier AI lab, applied ML startup, or in a research role with direct client/stakeholder interaction.\nExperience with evaluation and benchmarking of LLMs - designing metrics, building eval harnesses, interpreting results critically.\nFamiliarity with human data pipelines - annotation workflows, quality assurance methodology, inter-annotator agreement analysis.\nExperience with reinforcement learning, reward modeling, or RLHF environments.\nPublished research (conferences, journals, or technical reports) in ML/NLP or adjacent fields.\nWhat Matters More Than Credentials\nApplied instinct over academic purity. The measure of success here is client impact and publishable-but-practical results - not methodological novelty for its own sake. If your first instinct when handed a problem is to build a framework, this isn't the role. If your first instinct is to run an experiment and get a result, it is.\nComfort with ambiguity and incomplete information. Client engagements rarely come with clean problem statements. You'll need to extract the real question from a noisy conversation, scope an approach quickly, and iterate.\nCross-functional fluency. You will work daily with field engineers, project managers, operations teams, and an independent Applied Research team. Someone who can only operate within a pure research silo will struggle here.\nIntellectual honesty. When an ablation study shows the data isn't working, you need to say so - clearly and constructively - even when it's inconvenient for the deal timeline.\n\nWhat You Should Know About This Team\nWe are small and high-leverage. The FDRT is a team of five today. Every person's work directly influences client outcomes and Labelbox's market position.\nWe operate at the tempo of client delivery. Two-week sprints. SLAs measured in days. If you want months of uninterrupted focus on a single problem, our Applied Research team is a better fit.\nWe are at the intersection of several teams. FDRT works with Field Delivery Engineers, Human Data Operations, Applied Research, and client research teams. The role requires navigating those interfaces with credibility and without ego.\nWe protect time for research. 25-30% of team capacity is allocated to research collaboration with Applied Research. This is not aspirational - it is a structural commitment. You will have the opportunity to publish.\nLabelbox strives to ensure pay parity across the organization and discuss compensation transparently. The expected annual base salary range for United States-based candidates is below. This range is not inclusive of any potential equity packages or additional benefits. Exact compensation varies based on a variety of factors, including skills and competencies, experience, and geographical location.\nAnnual base salary range\n$200,000—$300,000 USD\nLife at Labelbox\nEnvironment: Fast-paced and high-intensity, perfect for ambitious individuals who thrive on ownership and quick decision-making\nGrowth: Career advancement opportunities directly tied to your impact\nVision: Be part of building the foundation for humanity's most transformative technology\nOur Vision\nWe believe data will remain crucial in achieving artificial general intelligence. As AI models become more sophisticated, the need for high-quality, specialized training data will only grow. Join us in developing new products and services that enable the next generation of AI breakthroughs.\nLabelbox is backed by leading investors including SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, B Capital, Gradient Ventures, Databricks Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins. Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading AI labs.\nYour Personal Data Privacy: Any personal information you provide Labelbox as a part of your application will be processed in accordance with Labelbox’s Job Applicant Privacy notice.\nAny emails from Labelbox team members will originate from a @labelbox.com email address. If you encounter anything that raises suspicions during your interactions, we encourage you to exercise caution and suspend or discontinue communications.","description_format":"text","description_chars":9363,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Continuous learning","Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI Training Data & Annotation"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-04-13T23:17:35Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 19 · green card filings: 1","filings_12m":19,"filings_prev_12m":12,"green_card_filings_12m":1,"median_offered_wage_usd":184000,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":13}],"liveness":{"score":4,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.134,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":185,"expected_fill_days":28,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":300000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/labelbox-forward-deployed-research-scientist","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/labelbox-forward-deployed-research-scientist.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T22:26:00Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4038,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":48105},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=48105"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Flabelbox-forward-deployed-research-scientist"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Flabelbox-forward-deployed-research-scientist"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Flabelbox-forward-deployed-research-scientist"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/labelbox-forward-deployed-research-scientist\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Flabelbox-forward-deployed-research-scientist"}]}