About Us

Essential AI’s mission is to deepen the partnership between humans and computers, unlocking collaborative capabilities that far exceed what could be achieved today. We believe that building delightful end-user experiences requires innovating across the stack - from the UX all the way down to models that achieve the best user value per FLOP.

We believe that a small, focused team of motivated individuals can create outsized breakthroughs. We are building a world-class multi-disciplinary team who are excited to solve hard real-world AI problems. We are well-capitalized and supported by March Capital and Thrive Capital, with participation from AMD, Franklin Venture Partners, Google, KB Investment, NVIDIA.

The Role

The Data Researcher will conduct research on techniques and methodologies to select and curate data that advances model capabilities and/or makes training more effective. Your work will directly impact our product use cases and overall data strategy, incorporating user feedback and industry knowledge. You will work closely with the data infrastructure team and crawling team to rapidly iterate on hypothesis.

What you will be working on

• Experimenting with strategies for curating, cleaning, structuring, and augmenting data at a large scale

• Designing efficient metrics that provide signals on data quality

• Developing proxies to evaluate performance of different data sources / data preparation strategies on downstream model performance

• Incorporate knowledge of product use cases and feedback into our data preparation strategy

• Collaborate closely with our data infrastructure and crawling teams to enable rapid experimentation

What we are looking for

• Highly skilled with Python.

• You have strong ML fundamentals and first principles thinking that guides your approach to research.

• Ability to write, debug and optimize distributed code, and understanding of data orchestration and automation tools (or strong willingness to learn)

• Familiarity with a distributed framework like Spark, Ray, etc

• Strong problem solving, analytical, communication, and collaboration skills.

• You enjoy building things from the ground up in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

We encourage you to apply for this position even if you don’t check all of the above requirements but want to spend time pushing on these techniques.

We are based in-person in SF and work fully onsite 5 days a week. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

The base pay range target for the role seniority described in this job description is up to $225,000 in San Francisco, CA. Final offer amounts depend on various job-related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews and our benchmarks against market compensation data. In addition to cash pay, full-time regular positions are eligible for equity, 401(k), health benefits, and other benefits like daily onsite lunches and snacks; some of these benefits may be available for part-time or temporary positions.

Essential AI commits to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment, as well as equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. You may view all of Essential AI’s recruiting notices here, including our EEO policy, recruitment scam notice, and recruitment agency policy.