Director, Forward Deployed Researcher - Data as a Service

New York City, NY (Hybrid); San Francisco, CA (Hybrid); United States (Remote). Posted 7 months ago

The role

This player-coach role involves leading a forward deployed research team and performing hands-on technical work on strategic accounts. You will partner with frontier AI labs to scope training data needs, design RL environments, and develop evaluation frameworks.

What you will do

Recruit, hire, and develop the forward deployed research team
Coach 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
Serve as escalation point for technically complex or high-stakes customer situations

Required 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
Excellent communication skills
Ability to work in a fast-moving environment, comfortable with ambiguity and rapid iteration

Nice to have

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, reasoni
Track record of hiring and developing technical talent
Experience operating against revenue or pipeline goals in a GTM organization
B.S. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field

About the company

Snorkel AI is the frontier AI data lab, helping teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier and agentic AI. Founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019, Snorkel works with leading AI labs and enterprises.