Research Associate in San Francisco

About the Team AI Research Lab is one of DoorDash’s frontier innovation hubs, focused on building the foundation for an AI-native future across our three core audiences: consumers, merchants, and dashers. As AI capabilities accelerate, the AI Research Lab operates at the center of technical exploration and real-world execution — connecting frontier model research, internal platform investments, operator teams, and strategic external partners. Our mission is to translate cutting-edge AI research into scalable, production-ready systems that drive measurable business impact. We combine deep technical rigor with strong operational execution to ensure that breakthrough capabilities become durable competitive advantages for DoorDash. About the Role As an Associate Manager, Strategy & Operations on our AI Research Lab, you will play a central role in converting frontier AI advancements into shipped products and scalable infrastructure. You will operate across research, product, and operations to move from early discovery and experimentation to deployment and impact. This role sits at the intersection of customer insight, technical innovation, and business execution. You will help define and scale the Lab’s most important bets while building the foundations that enable AI applications to compound over time. You’re Excited About This Opportunity Because You Will … Reimagining core experiences through AI, such as the merchant journey, by partnering directly with in-field merchants, sales, support, product, and engineering teams. You will help unify major initiatives into a coherent, AI-native interaction model. Own revenue-driving AI initiatives, operating as the accountable business owner for high-priority AI bets and ensuring clear linkage between technical progress and financial outcomes. Lead business planning cycles, developing go-to-market strategies for AI-powered products and capabilities, overseeing execution through structured project plans, resource allocation,

About Snorkel At Snorkel, we believe meaningful AI doesn’t start with the model, it starts with the data. We’re on a mission to help enterprises transform expert knowledge into specialized AI at scale. The AI landscape has gone through incredible changes since 2015, when Snorkel started as a research project in the Stanford AI Lab, to the generative AI breakthroughs of today. But one thing has remained constant: the data you use to build AI is the key to achieving differentiation, high performance, and production-ready systems. We work with some of the world’s largest organizations to empower scientists, engineers, financial experts, product creators, journalists, and more to build custom AI with their data faster than ever before. Excited to help us redefine how AI is built? Apply to be the newest Snorkeler! Counsel, Commercial What You’ll Do Snorkel AI is looking for a Counsel, Commercial to join our growing Legal team, reporting to Snorkel’s Associate General Counsel, Commercial. This is a key role across Snorkel’s commercial contracting function, including vendor agreements and customer agreements. You will serve as a trusted legal partner to business teams across the company, drafting, reviewing, and negotiating a wide range of commercial contracts while helping build scalable processes. You’ll work closely with cross-functional stakeholders, combining strong commercial legal skills with the hands-on, execution-oriented approach required in a fast-growing technology company. This hybrid role is based in San Francisco or New York City. Responsibilities Draft, review, and negotiate a broad range of commercial contracts, including vendor and customer agreements, NDAs, MSAs, SOWs, order forms, and other commercial arrangements. Serve as a trusted legal partner to cross-functional teams on commercial contracts. Manage a high volume of contracts and competing priorities, ensuring timely execution and alignment with business objectives. Review and negotiate commercial

Come join our legal team to work on the most exciting legal, policy, and operational issues at the leading edge of AI. We're seeking strong product lawyers with specialized expertise in intellectual property law. As product counsel, you will advise on all legal aspects of product development, launch, and operations - including regulatory compliance, user terms, and risk management - while bringing deep expertise in your specialized legal area. The ideal candidate will have deep subject matter expertise in intellectual property law, a technology background, and a demonstrable history of providing practical product counsel to solve complex, time-sensitive problems in close partnership with cross-functional teams. This role reoprts to the Associate General Counsel, IP & Product. You will: Strategic Product Advice: Lead IP strategy for product development, embedding IP protection into the full product lifecycle from conception to commercialization, while also advising on related product and regulatory matters in collaboration with the broader legal team. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Research, Product, Engineering, Operations, Communications, and Marketing teams to mitigate IP risks in product development, data licensing, and open-source governance. IP Counsel: Support management of Scale's worldwide IP portfolio including patents and trademarks; assist with patent prosecution and trademark registration and enforcement. Risk Mitigation: Advise on third-party, synthetic, and open-source data and models, ensuring compliance with licensing requirements; design open-source governance policies. Agreements: Support drafting and negotiation of commercial agreement provisions involving intellectual property. Specialized Expertise: Provide counsel on machine learning, robotics, and other technical areas, with ability to engage effectively with technical teams on complex engineering and product issues. Training: Develop and deliver IP and data licensing trainin

Scale Labs, Research Scientist — Agent Robustness As the leading data and evaluation partner for frontier AI companies, Scale plays an integral role in understanding the capabilities and safeguarding AI models and systems. Building on this expertise, Scale Labs has launched a new team focused on policy research, to bridge the gap between AI research and global policymakers to make informed, scientific decisions about AI risks and capabilities. Our research tackles the hardest problems in agent robustness, AI control protocols, and AI risk evaluations to help governments, industry, and the public understand and mitigate AI risk while maximizing AI adoption. This team collaborates broadly across industry, the public sector, and academia and regularly publishes our findings. We are actively seeking talented researchers to join us in shaping this vision. As a Research Scientist working on Agent Robustness you will work on the fundamental challenges of building AI agents that are safe and aligned with humans. For example, you might: Research the science of AI agent capabilities with a focus on how they relate to safety, risk factors, and methodologies for benchmarking them; Design and build harnesses to test AI agents’ tendency to take harmful actions when pressured to do so by users or tricked into doing so by elements of their environment; Design and build exploits and mitigations for new and unique failure modes that arise as AI agents gain affordances like coding, web browsing, and computer use; Characterize and design mitigations for potential failure modes or broader risks of systems involving multiple interacting AI agents. Ideally you’d have: Commitment to our mission of promoting safe, secure, and trustworthy AI deployments in the industry as frontier AI capabilities continue to advance. Practical experience conducting technical research collaboratively. You should be comfortable building and leveraging agent scaffolding, designing evaluation harnesses, an

Scale Labs, Research Scientist — AI Controls and Monitoring As the leading data and evaluation partner for frontier AI companies, Scale plays an integral role in understanding the capabilities and safeguarding AI models and systems. Building on this expertise, Scale Labs has launched a new team focused on policy research, to bridge the gap between AI research and global policymakers to make informed, scientific decisions about AI risks and capabilities. Our research tackles the hardest problems in agent robustness, AI control protocols, and AI risk evaluations to help governments, industry, and the public understand and mitigate AI risk while maximizing AI adoption. This team collaborates broadly across industry, the public sector, and academia and regularly publishes our findings. We are actively seeking talented researchers to join us in shaping this vision. As a Research Scientist focused on AI Controls and Monitoring, you will design methods, systems, and experiments to ensure that advanced AI models and agents remain aligned with intended goals, even in high-stakes or adversarial environments. For example, you might: Develop monitoring techniques and observability methods that track AI behavior in real time to identify and flag deviations, emergent capabilities, or anomalous outputs; Research mechanisms for layered control, including fail-safes, oversight protocols, and intervention methods that can halt or redirect AI systems when risks are detected; Design red-team simulations to probe weaknesses in oversight and control mechanisms, and build mitigations to close identified gaps; Collaborate with policymakers, engineers, and other researchers to establish standards and benchmarks for AI monitoring and escalation. Ideally you’d have: Commitment to our mission of promoting safe, secure, and trustworthy AI deployments in the industry as frontier AI capabilities continue to advance. Practical experience conducting technical research collaboratively. You should be

Scale works with the industry’s leading AI labs to provide high quality data and accelerate progress in GenAI research. We are looking for Research Scientists and Research Engineers with expertise in LLM post-training (SFT, RLHF, reward modeling). This role will focus on optimizing data curation and eval to enhance LLM capabilities in both text and multimodal modalities. In this role, you will develop novel methods to improve the alignment and generalization of large-scale generative models. You will collaborate with researchers and engineers to define best practices in data-driven AI development. You will also partner with top foundation model labs to provide both technical and strategic input on the development of the next generation of generative AI models. You will: Research and develop novel post-training techniques, including SFT, RLHF, and reward modeling, to enhance LLM core capabilities in both text and multimodal modalities. Design and experiment new approaches to preference optimization. Analyze model behavior, identify weaknesses, and propose solutions for bias mitigation and model robustness. Publish research findings in top-tier AI conferences. Ideally you’d have: Ph.D. or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related field. Deep understanding of deep learning, reinforcement learning, and large-scale model fine-tuning. Experience with post-training techniques such as RLHF, preference modeling, or instruction tuning. Excellent written and verbal communication skills Published research in areas of machine learning at major conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, etc.) and/or journals Previous experience in a customer facing role. Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of several career levels at Scale; it will be determined du

Scale works with the industry's leading AI labs to provide high quality data and accelerate progress in GenAI research. We are looking for Research Scientists and Research Engineers with expertise in LLM post-training (SFT, RLHF, reward modeling) and evaluation. This role is on the evaluation pod within the GenAI Research Organization and will focus on building benchmarks and diagnosing model failure modes in both text and multimodal modalities. In this role, you will develop rigorous evaluations and diagnostic methods that reveal where frontier models fail and why. You will collaborate with researchers and engineers to define best practices in evaluation-driven AI development. You will also partner with top foundation model labs to translate failure analysis into technical and strategic input on the next generation of generative AI models. You will: Analyze model behavior to identify, characterize, and diagnose failure modes in frontier LLMs and Agents. You’ll identify everything from capability gaps and reasoning errors to robustness and alignment issues, all focusing on RCA. Design and build benchmarks and evaluation methods that measure LLM capabilities in both text and multimodal modalities. Apply post-training expertise (SFT, RLHF, reward modeling) to connect observed failures to the data and training interventions that address them. Publish research findings in top-tier AI conferences. Ideally you’d have: Ph.D. or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related field. Deep understanding of deep learning, reinforcement learning, and large-scale model fine-tuning. Experience with post-training techniques such as RLHF, preference modeling, or instruction tuning, and with LLM evaluation or benchmark development. Excellent written and verbal communication skills. Published research in areas of machine learning at major conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, etc.) and/or journals. Previous experience in a customer facing r

Scale’s ML platform (RLXF) team builds our internal distributed framework for large language model training and inference. The platform has been powering MLEs, researchers, data scientists and operators for fast and automatic training and evaluation of LLM's, as well as evaluation of data quality. Scale is uniquely positioned at the heart of the field of AI as an indispensable provider of training and evaluation data and end-to-end solutions for the ML lifecycle. You will work closely across Scale’s ML teams and researchers to build the foundation platform that supports all our ML research and development. You will be building and optimizing the platform to enable our next generation of LLM training, inference and data curation. If you are excited about shaping the future AI via fundamental innovations, we would love to hear from you! You will: Build, profile and optimize our training and inference framework Collaborate with ML teams to accelerate their research and development and enable them to develop the next generation of models and data curation Research and integrate state-of-the-art technologies to optimize our ML system Ideally you’d have: Strong excitement about system optimization Experience with multi-node LLM training and inference Experience with developing large-scale distributed ML systems Strong software engineering skills, proficient in frameworks and tools such as CUDA, Pytorch, transformers, flash attention, etc. Strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to operate in a cross functional team environment Nice to haves: Demonstrated expertise in post-training methods &/or next generation use cases for large language models including instruction tuning, RLHF, tool use, reasoning, agents, and multimodal, etc. Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the positi

About Scale At Scale AI, our mission is to accelerate the development of AI applications. For 8 years, Scale has been the leading AI data foundry, helping fuel the most exciting advancements in AI, including: generative AI, defense applications, and autonomous vehicles. With our recent Series F round, we’re accelerating the abundance of frontier data to pave the road to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and building upon our prior model evaluation work with enterprise customers and governments, to deepen our capabilities and offerings for both public and private evaluations. About the ACE team The Agent Capabilities & Environments (ACE) team, part of Scale’s Research organization, brings together customer-facing Researchers and Applied AI Engineers. Our core mission includes research on agent environments and RL reward signals, benchmarking autonomous agent performance across real-world scenarios and environments, creating robust data programs to improve Large Language Models (LLMs) agentic capabilities and building foundational tools and frameworks for evaluating models as agents. ACE focuses on autonomous agents that dynamically interact with diverse external environments, including code repositories, GUI interfaces, browsers, and more. About This Role This role is at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and practical application, with a focus on studying the data types essential for building state-of-the-art agents, such as browser and SWE agents. The ideal candidate will explore the data landscape needed to advance intelligent, adaptable AI agents, guiding the data strategy at Scale to drive innovation. This position requires not only expertise in LLM agents and planning algorithms but also creativity in addressing novel challenges related to data, interaction, and evaluation. You will contribute to impactful research publications on agents, collaborate with customer researchers, and work alongside the engineering team to translate t

Scale Labs, Research Scientist — Safety Post Training As the leading data and evaluation partner for frontier AI companies, Scale plays an integral role in understanding the capabilities and safeguarding AI models and systems. Building on this expertise, Scale Labs has launched a new team focused on policy research, to bridge the gap between AI research and global policymakers to make informed, scientific decisions about AI risks and capabilities. Our research tackles the hardest problems in agent robustness, AI control protocols, and AI risk evaluations to help governments, industry, and the public understand and mitigate AI risk while maximizing AI adoption. This team collaborates broadly across industry, the public sector, and academia and regularly publishes our findings. We are actively seeking talented researchers to join us in shaping this vision. As a Research Scientist working on Safety Post-Training you will develop and apply post-training methods and interpretability techniques to make frontier AI systems safer, and better understood by researchers and policymakers.. For example, you might: Design and run post-training pipelines to study how training choices affect model safety, robustness, and alignment properties; Develop interpretability-informed evaluations that reveal how and why models produce unsafe, deceptive, or otherwise undesirable behaviors, and use those insights to guide targeted mitigations; Collaborate with policymakers, engineers, and other researchers to translate post-training and interpretability findings into actionable safety standards, evaluation benchmarks, and best practices. Ideally you’d have: Commitment to our mission of promoting safe, secure, and trustworthy AI deployments in the industry as frontier AI capabilities continue to advance. Experience with post-training and RL techniques such as RLHF, DPO, GRPO, and similar approaches. A track record of published research in machine learning, particularly in generati

Scale Labs, Research Scientist — Frontier Risk Evaluations As the leading data and evaluation partner for frontier AI companies, Scale plays an integral role in understanding the capabilities and safeguarding AI models and systems. Building on this expertise, Scale Labs has launched a new team focused on policy research, to bridge the gap between AI research and global policymakers to make informed, scientific decisions about AI risks and capabilities. Our research tackles the hardest problems in agent robustness, AI control protocols, and AI risk evaluations to help governments, industry, and the public understand and mitigate AI risk while maximizing AI adoption. This team collaborates broadly across industry, the public sector, and academia and regularly publishes our findings. We are actively seeking talented researchers to join us in shaping this vision. As a Research Scientist focused on Frontier Risk Evaluations, you will design and create evaluation measures, harnesses and datasets for measuring the risks posed by frontier AI systems. For example, you might do any or all of the following: Design and build harnesses to test AI models and systems (including agents) for dangerous capabilities such as security vulnerability exploitation, CBRN uplift, and other high-risk activities; Work with government agencies or other labs to collectively scope and design evaluations to measure and mitigate risks posed by advanced AI systems; Publish evaluation methodologies and write technical reports for policymakers. Ideally you’d have: Commitment to our mission of promoting safe, secure, and trustworthy AI deployments in the industry as frontier AI capabilities continue to advance. Practical experience conducting technical research collaboratively. You should be comfortable building and instrumenting ML pipelines, writing evaluation harnesses, and quickly turning new ideas from the research literature into working prototypes. A track record of published research in m

About the Team The DoorDash Research Fellowship is a 3-month program (extendable to 6 months) looking for Summer and Fall 2026 cohorts, for researchers and engineers who want to work on the hardest applied ML and AI problems in local commerce. Fellows are given the resources, autonomy, and access to real-world operational data needed to pursue ambitious research directions — with the goal of producing work that influences both the field and how DoorDash operates at scale. This program is modeled on the best external research fellowships: fellows are treated as independent researchers, not as junior employees on a product team. You pick the problem (within a set of priority areas), you own the direction, and you publish or ship the outcome. You’re excited about this opportunity because you will receive… Dedicated compute allocation sized to the research agenda — GPU clusters for training and inference budgets for experimentation Full access to DoorDash's research infrastructure — our internal RL stack, training and evaluation pipelines, RL environments built on real operational systems, agent evaluation harnesses, and the tooling our own research teams use day-to-day. Fellows are first-class users, not sandboxed visitors. Access to DoorDash operational data — real-world datasets spanning logistics, merchant operations, consumer behavior, and marketplace dynamics, under appropriate data governance Research mentorship from senior researchers and engineering leaders at DoorDash, plus a named research sponsor for each fellow who meets with you weekly and is accountable for unblocking your work Speaker series featuring leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry — faculty from top ML programs, research leads from frontier AI labs, and senior operators from across tech. Fellows get dedicated 1:1 time with speakers when possible. A cohort of fellows working alongside you — a small, tight-knit group of researchers tackling different problems but sharing

About Scale Scale’s mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world’s most important decisions. As the leading AI data foundry, we provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world’s most advanced models — fueling breakthroughs in generative AI, defense, and autonomous vehicles. We partner with leading enterprises and governments to bring AI into production that performs when it matters most, combining rigorous evaluation with full-stack deployment so our customers can build AI they can trust. About the Team Applied Intelligence Systems (AIS) is part of the Scale Generative AI Platform (SGP), focused on pushing the frontier of what agentic applications can do across diverse enterprise and government use cases. We build the infrastructure and tooling that power agentic AI in production, paired with applied ML research, design, and evaluation to ensure these systems perform reliably at the scale our customers demand. AIS spans multiple workstreams — agent evaluation and oversight, orchestration and tool-use infrastructure, model and systems optimization, and applied research on new agent capabilities — and this role is not scoped to any single one of them. We’re growing fast, with increasing traction across both commercial and public sector customers, and we’re just getting started — this team will define what dependable, production-grade agentic AI looks like. About the Role As a Staff Machine Learning Research Engineer, you will operate across the full breadth of AIS’s technical needs — wherever the hardest ML problem in agentic AI happens to be that quarter. This could mean training and fine-tuning models, designing evaluation and observability systems, building improvement loops from production data, prototyping novel agent architectures, or designing internal systems and tooling that boost productivity across teams. You’re not tied to one team’s roadmap; you’re expected to move to where the technical leverage is highest, and t

Scale AI is the data foundation for AI, helping organizations build and deploy reliable production AI applications. We partner with leading enterprises and government organizations to accelerate their AI initiatives through our data annotation platform, generative AI solutions, and enterprise AI capabilities. About the General Agents Team The General Agents team, part of Scale’s Enterprise organization, builds robust general agents for customer use cases and applications. The team sits at the intersection of frontier agent development and real-world deployment, translating state-of-the-art reasoning and agentic capabilities into reliable, production-grade systems that drive real economic value. Our agents are scalable systems built around recurring enterprise problem domains, with a strong emphasis on generalization, extensibility, and deployment across many customers. About the Role As a Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) on the General Agents team, you’ll play a critical role in designing, building, and deploying production-ready AI agents that solve high-impact enterprise problems. You will work across the full agent lifecycle—from model and system design to evaluation, deployment, and iteration—bridging cutting-edge agentic techniques with the constraints and requirements of real customer environments. You will: Design and implement end-to-end agent systems that combine LLM reasoning, tool use, memory, and control logic to solve recurring enterprise use cases. Build scalable, reliable agent architectures that can be deployed across many customers with varying data, tools, and constraints. Develop evaluation frameworks, datasets, environments, and metrics to measure agent performance, reliability, and business impact in production settings. Collaborate closely with product managers, customers, data annotators, and other engineering teams to translate enterprise requirements into robust agent designs. Productionize frontier agent techniques (e.g.,

Scale's LLM post-training platform team builds our internal distributed framework for large language model training. The platform powers MLEs, researchers, data scientists, and operators for fast and automatic training and evaluation of LLMs. It also serves as the underlying training framework for the data quality evaluation pipeline. Scale is uniquely positioned at the heart of the field of AI as an indispensable provider of training and evaluation data and end-to-end solutions for the ML lifecycle. You will work closely with Scale’s ML teams and researchers to build the foundation platform which supports all our ML research and development works. You will be building and optimizing the platform to enable our next generation LLM training, inference and data curation. If you are excited about shaping the future AI via fundamental innovations, we would love to hear from you! You will: Build, profile and optimize our training and inference framework. Collaborate with ML and research teams to accelerate their research and development, and enable them to develop the next generation of models and data curation. Research and integrate state-of-the-art technologies to optimize our ML system. Ideally you’d have: Passionate about system optimization Experience with multi-node LLM training and inference Experience with developing large-scale distributed ML systems Experience with post-training methods like RLHF/RLVR and related algorithms like PPO/GRPO etc. Strong software engineering skills, proficient in frameworks and tools such as CUDA, Pytorch, transformers, flash attention, etc. Strong written and verbal communication skills to operate in a cross functional team environment. Nice to haves: Demonstrated expertise in post-training methods and/or next generation use cases for large language models including instruction tuning, RLHF, tool use, reasoning, agents, and multimodal, etc. Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity,