Forward Deployed Research Scientist
Hybrid (San Francisco Bay Area)$200k - $300kfull-timePosted 6mo ago
About the role
Role combining research science with client delivery in Labelbox's Forward Deployed Research Team (FDRT). You’ll work across multiple client engagements on timescales of days to weeks, engaging directly with frontier lab research teams, fine-tuning open-weight models, assessing data strategy, and contributing to publications and benchmarks.
Responsibilities
- Engage directly with frontier lab research teams in client scoping meetings as a technical peer.
- Develop deep scientific understanding of client engagements by modeling architecture, training methodology, and target capabilities; reason about data strategy, identify risks, and iterate empirically.
- Run ablation studies and fine-tune open-weight models on client data (and proxy data) to measure data impact on model performance.
- Consult on workflow and quality systems by reviewing annotation schemas, task designs, and quality rubrics with the Human Data Operations team.
- Collaborate with Applied Research on publications, benchmarks, white papers, and conference submissions; contribute to jointly completed projects.
Qualifications
- MS or PhD in Machine Learning, NLP, Computer Science, or related quantitative field.
- Hands-on experience fine-tuning large language models (open-weight models such as Llama, Mistral, Qwen, or similar).
- Strong understanding of LLM training pipelines (pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, RLHF/DPO) and data quality impact.
- Experience designing and executing rigorous experiments (hypothesis formation, controlled comparisons, statistical analysis).
- Ability to operate at speed from problem definition to experimental results in days.
- Strong written and verbal communication; ability to present findings to client teams and contribute to published work.
Skills
Required:Fine-tuning large language modelsLLM training pipelinesExperiment design and analysisScientific communication
Benefits
- Labelbox emphasizes high-impact work, technical excellence, speed, continuous growth, clear ownership.
Last updated Sep 2, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Labelbox
The data factory for AI teams
Labelbox delivers the software and services to help you build, operate, or staff your data factory
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