Lead Research Engineer, Data Quality

Clera

$150K — $180K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years in research or data quality engineering for AI/ML data evaluation.
  • Proven experience leading teams on complex data quality projects.
  • Advanced skills in Python, Docker, and Linux environments.
  • Deep understanding of AI evaluations and post-training assessments.
  • Experience in building validation workflows and QC systems for AI models.
  • Ability to translate research findings into scalable production systems.
  • Strong communication skills for explaining methodologies to diverse stakeholders.

Responsibilities

  • Lead a team to build evaluation systems for data quality across various environments.
  • Define and implement strategies for data quality and QC standards.
  • Develop large-scale synthetic data validation methods, including failure analysis.
  • Collaborate with engineers and domain experts to enhance data generation workflows.
  • Translate qualitative insights into usable production systems and internal tools.
  • Cultivate a robust understanding of high-quality training data characteristics.
  • Mentor engineers to uphold high standards of technical rigor and execution.

Benefits

  • Visa sponsorship available for eligible candidates.
  • Work in vibrant San Francisco, CA environment.
  • Opportunity to mentor and lead in a high-impact role.
Full Job Description
About the Role

This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role owning the strategy and systems that measure, improve, and scale training data for frontier AI agents. You will sit at the intersection of research and engineering, leading a team that defines what high-quality agent training data looks like and building the infrastructure to enforce that bar at scale. The work directly shapes the post-training data that aligns AI models to real-world tasks.
What You'll Do
  • Lead the data quality team in building evaluation systems across RL environments, synthetic data, benchmarks, and domain-specific workflows.
  • Define data quality strategy by building QC systems, enforcing standards, and designing experiments to grade agent outputs.
  • Develop methods for validating synthetic data at scale, including failure-mode analysis, task mutation checks, and trajectory auditing.
  • Partner with research engineers, domain experts, and data vendors to diagnose quality issues and improve data generation workflows.
  • Translate qualitative research insights into production systems: validation pipelines, dashboards, internal tools, and feedback loops.
  • Help build internal research taste around what makes agent training data realistic, learnable, diverse, reliable, and genuinely useful.
  • Mentor research engineers to maintain a high bar for technical rigor, clarity, and execution speed.
What We're Looking For
  • 5+ years of experience in research or data quality engineering, specifically building systems for AI/ML data evaluation.
  • Demonstrated experience leading technical projects or teams in data quality or AI/ML evaluation, ideally on ambiguous, open-ended problems.
  • Advanced proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments.
  • Deep, research-oriented understanding of AI evals and post-training, beyond surface-level agent frameworks.
  • Experience building QC systems, benchmarks, synthetic data pipelines, validation workflows, or model evaluation infrastructure.
  • Ability to reason carefully about what makes training data high-quality for AI agents, not just technically valid.
  • Experience translating research insights into production pipelines and internal tooling.
  • Ability to collaborate with domain experts and data vendors, capturing expert judgment and converting it into scalable review or generation systems.
  • Strong written communication skills, with the ability to explain methodology clearly to researchers, engineers, and external stakeholders.
  • Comfort designing metrics, experiments, and QA/QC processes independently.
  • Early-stage startup experience and the ability to move quickly in fast-paced, resource-constrained environments.
  • Detail-oriented mindset with a sharp eye for subtle inconsistencies and edge cases in data.
Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $150,000 to $180,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States. This role is not fully remote.

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