{"id":3140003,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sciforium-foundation-model-data-engineer-3","title":"Foundation Model Data Engineer","company":{"id":716759,"name":"Sciforium","domain":"sciforium.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/sciforium-2","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":85,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.8,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":11,"computed_at":"2026-10-24T06:02:35Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","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":155000,"max":210000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":210000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"DPO","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Pre-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Ray","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":true}],"status":"closed","first_seen_at":"2026-10-23T03:44:37Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-23","last_verified_at":"2026-10-23T21:43:09Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":"2026-10-23T21:43:09Z","days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Sciforium is an AI infrastructure company developing next-generation multimodal AI models and a proprietary, high-efficiency serving platform. Backed by multi-million-dollar funding and direct sponsorship from AMD with hands-on support from AMD engineers the team is scaling rapidly to build the full stack powering frontier AI models and real-time applications.\nRole Overview\nSciforium is seeking a highly technical and visionary Foundation Model Data Engineer to lead the strategy, creation, and curation of the massive datasets that power our foundation models. We believe that in the era of LLMs, data is the primary competitive advantage. In this role, you will own the end-to-end data lifecycle-from raw web-scale crawling to the fine-grained human-alignment datasets that define model behavior.\nThis position is ideal for a scientist who views data as a high-scale engineering challenge and an analytical puzzle. You will not just \"provide\" data; you will design the taxonomies, filtering heuristics, and post-training pipelines that ensure our models are world-class in reasoning, safety, and multimodal understanding.\nKey Responsibilities\nFoundation Dataset Strategy: Own the end-to-end creation of pre-training datasets for LLMs. This includes defining the mix of web data, code, books, and technical papers to optimize for downstream model performance.\n\nPetabyte-Scale Curation: Design and implement sophisticated pipelines for data cleaning, exact/fuzzy deduplication, and high-quality signal extraction from petabytes of raw, unstructured data.\n\nPost-Training & Alignment Data: Lead the development of high-quality post-training datasets, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) instructions, multi-turn dialogues, and preference modeling data (RLHF/DPO).\n\nMultimodal Expansion: Drive the acquisition and processing of vision and video data, navigating the complexities of multimodal alignment, video compression, and temporal data consistency.\n\nHigh-Performance Engineering: Develop high-throughput data processing scripts using Python, leveraging multiprocessing and multithreading to handle massive-scale ingestion and transformation without bottlenecks.\n\nData Profiling & Analysis: Conduct deep-dive statistical analysis on training corpora to identify biases, gaps in knowledge, and quality regressions, ensuring the \"diet\" of the model is mathematically balanced.\n\nSynthetic Data Generation: (Added Value) Design pipelines to generate high-reasoning synthetic data to augment gaps in natural datasets, utilizing existing models for data labeling and refinement.\n\nMust-Haves\n5+ years of industry experience in Data Science or Machine Learning, with a proven track record of building and managing datasets for foundation models.\n\nDeep Proficiency in Python: Expert-level skills with a focus on high-performance code, including multiprocessing, multithreading, and efficient memory management for large-scale data tasks.\n\nPetabyte-Scale Experience: Demonstrated experience working with petabyte-scale datasets that have been directly used to train production-grade LLMs or Large Vision Models.\n\nDataset Reconstruction: Experience building massive LLM training sets from scratch, including raw web crawls (e.g., Common Crawl) and specialized domain data.\n\nPost-Training Expertise: Hands-on experience building datasets for RLHF, DPO, and multi-turn instruction following, including the management of human-labeling workflows and quality gold-sets.\n\nData Tooling: Mastery of data-at-scale frameworks such as Spark, Ray, or high-performance data-loading formats (e.g., WebDataset, Parquet).\n\nNice-to-Haves\nComputer Vision (CV) Curation: Experience building large-scale image or video datasets from scratch (e.g., LAION-style pipelines).\n\nMultimodal Crawling: Familiarity with large-scale crawling of multimodal data and the associated challenges of video processing, codecs, and compression.\n\nTaxonomy Design: Experience in designing complex labeling schemas for reasoning, coding, and mathematical benchmarks.\n\nResearch Background: A Master’s or PhD in a quantitative field with a focus on data-centric AI or information retrieval.\n\nBenefits include\nMedical, dental, and vision insurance\n\n401k plan\n\nDaily lunch, snacks, and beverages\n\nFlexible time off\n\nCompetitive salary and equity\n\nEqual opportunity\nSciforium is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4542,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Equity","Flexible time off","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI Compute & Inference"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-23T07:48:48Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-23T21:43:09Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 5","filings_12m":5,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":175500,"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)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":null,"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":210000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/sciforium-foundation-model-data-engineer-3","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sciforium-foundation-model-data-engineer-3.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-24T20:36:55Z","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":30040,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-25T00:00:00Z"}},"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":716759},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=716759"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsciforium-foundation-model-data-engineer-3"},{"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%2Fsciforium-foundation-model-data-engineer-3"},{"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%2Fsciforium-foundation-model-data-engineer-3"},{"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/sciforium-foundation-model-data-engineer-3\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsciforium-foundation-model-data-engineer-3"}]}