← All roles

Senior Research Manager

hud· Operations
Apply on company site
Hybrid (San Francisco), Hybrid (Singapore)$120k - $295kFull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Lead research direction and manage researchers to improve HUD’s agent training data, evals, and data workflows for scalable, high-quality AI training data platforms.

Responsibilities

  • Set the research direction for data quality, including how HUD measures how training data impacts agent behavior and performance after training, and what makes data valuable
  • Lead synthetic data efforts to understand how various data types can be efficiently transformed into formats useful for training
  • Lead research engineers from problem definition through experiments, implementation, and clear conclusions; coach them to strengthen technical judgment and execution
  • Design and review experiments that connect model behavior and failure modes to data, environment, and reward design
  • Develop methods for validating and improving training data at scale, including trajectory audits, adversarial checks, and feedback loops that help users improve their data
  • Partner with research engineers, domain experts, and data vendors to turn research insights into better workflows, tools, and quality standards
  • Communicate findings and tradeoffs clearly so the team can prioritize work and apply what it learns across research areas

Qualifications

  • Experience leading technical research projects to completion, from an open question to evidence, a decision, and a working result
  • Experience directly managing and mentoring researchers or research engineers while remaining engaged in technical work
  • A strong understanding of machine learning and reinforcement learning, including how training objectives, data, and feedback shape model behavior
  • Experience with agent training data, evals, benchmarks, synthetic data, or model evaluation infrastructure
  • Sound experimental judgment: you can distinguish a useful training signal from a task or metric that only looks convincing
  • Strong written communication and the ability to explain methods and findings to researchers, engineers, and external partners

Skills

Required:Research leadershipMachine learning / reinforcement learning

Benefits

  • Competitive compensation
  • 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision (US and Singapore employees)
  • Lunch and dinner for in-office employees
  • Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays
  • Equinox membership, 401k, and commuter benefits (US employees) and health/wellness stipend (Singapore employees)
  • Unlimited access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc. (no known usage limits)
  • Two top-floor offices in San Francisco’s Union Square and Singapore’s Raffles Place
  • Annual travel budget to visit either office
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
hud logo

About hud

Platform for building RL environments and evals

HUD (YC W25) is developing agentic evals and RL environments for Computer Use Agents (CUAs) that browse the web for frontier AI labs. Our CUA Evals framework is the first comprehensive evaluation tool for CUAs. People don't actually know if AI agents are working reliably. To make AI agents work in the real world, we need detailed evals for a huge range of tasks. We're backed by Y Combinator, and work closely with frontier AI labs to provide agent evaluation and training infrastructure at scale.

artificial-intelligencereinforcement-learning
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at hud