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Director, Forward Deployed Researcher - Data as a Service

Snorkel AI· 415 - DaaS Sales & Success
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Hybrid (New York City, NY), Hybrid (San Francisco, CA), Remote$228k - $403.2k + equity + bonusFull-timePosted 7mo ago

About the role

Director level role leading a forward deployed research team that partners with frontier AI labs to tackle data-related challenges, including scoping training data, designing RL environments, and developing evaluation frameworks. Hybrid/remote role with a balance of people leadership and hands-on technical work on strategic accounts.

Responsibilities

  • Recruit, hire, and develop the forward deployed research team, coaching the team on technical quality, customer engagement, and career growth
  • Set and maintain the technical bar for specifications, evaluation frameworks, and customer deliverables
  • Own SE capacity planning and account coverage; partner with AE leadership on deal strategy, engagement prioritization, and pipeline forecasting
  • Establish team processes and playbooks for discovery, spec development, and knowledge sharing
  • Lead technical conversations on select strategic accounts, including scoping, solution design, and partnership with frontier AI research teams
  • Serve as escalation point for technically complex or high-stakes customer situations

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of experience in applied ML, AI solutions engineering, technical presales, or research-intensive customer-facing roles
  • 5+ years managing or leading technical individual contributors, ideally in a presales or solutions engineering org
  • Strong expertise in frontier AI concepts including LLMs, training data pipelines, evaluation methodologies, post-training techniques (RLHF, DPO, RLAIF), and domain areas such as coding agents, reasoning, multimodal models, or RL environments
  • Track record of hiring and developing technical talent
  • Experience operating against revenue or pipeline goals in a GTM organization
  • Excellent communication skills, able to coach a team, partner with sales leadership, and engage credibly with frontier AI researchers
  • Ability to work in a fast-moving environment, comfortable with ambiguity and rapid iteration
  • B.S. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field

Skills

Required:Team leadership and people managementTechnical leadershipFrontier AI concepts

Benefits

  • Be Your Best at Snorkel culture and growth opportunities
  • Equal Employment Opportunity employer with focus on diversity and inclusion
  • Reasonable accommodation in hiring process and employment
  • Competitive base salary plus variable compensation and equity
Last updated Sep 30, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Snorkel AI

Shaping how AI learns through better data

Snorkel AI delivers the highest quality specialized datasets for frontier LLMs and enterprise models.

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