ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a Research Scientist to work on reinforcement learning for training and aligning large language models. This is a foundational research role focused on one of the most consequential open data problems in AI: how to generate the data, reward signals, and training procedures that steer LLM behavior in reliable and generalizable directions - and a core capability that directly differentiates Snorkel's data-as-a-service offering.
You'll work closely with Snorkel's research, engineering, and delivery teams to advance our RL data capabilities - translating research ideas into the preference datasets, reward models, and RL-ready corpora we produce for frontier AI labs, and contributing to a research agenda that is central to Snorkel's long-term differentiation as a provider of bespoke training data.
MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES - Research and implement reinforcement learning techniques - including GRPO, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, and reward modeling - and translate them into data products (preference datasets, reward signals, verifiable rewards) that customers can use to train and fine-tune large language models.
- Design and build data pipelines that generate high-quality training signal for RL workflows, including AI-assisted data annotation and curation data pipelines to improve model generalization to unseen benchmarks .
- Prototype and iterate on end-to-end RL training recipes that inform what data Snorkel ships as part of its data-as-a-service deliveries.
- Work closely with research scientists, ML engineers, and delivery teams to translate RL research into customer-ready data products.
- Stay current with the latest developments in large-scale muli-node LLM training, alignment research, and scalable RL methods (on complex environments such as Terminal-Bench), bringing relevant advances into Snorkel's data-as-a-service approach.
- Contribute to Snorkel's research publications and internal knowledge base in RL and model training.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Deep expertise in reinforcement learning from human or AI feedback, reward modeling and credit attribution ideally with a clear perspective on what data makes these techniques work.
- Experience training or fine-tuning 30B+ large language models at scale, including familiarity with distributed training infrastructure.
- Strong proficiency in Python and ML frameworks, especially PyTorch and HuggingFace and hands-on experience with RL frameworks such as Verl and SkyRL.
- Solid software engineering fundamentals - you can build research prototypes that others can run, extend, and integrate into data production workflows.
- Familiarity with ML infrastructure and cloud platforms and tools (AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Slurm, etc.); experience with large-scale RL training pipelines a strong plus.
- Comfort operating in a high-iteration environment with open-ended research questions and shifting, customer-driven technical constraints.
- Ph.D. in machine learning, reinforcement learning, or a related field strongly preferred; exceptional industry experience considered.
