About the role
What we're looking for:
We need someone with 0-5 years of experience in AI/ML research or technical product management who is deeply technical, research-minded, and comfortable navigating ambiguity at a fast-paced early-stage startup. You should be fluent in LLM evaluations, benchmarks, and coding agents, with a track record of shipping technical projects end-to-end. Bonus points if you have founder experience or have worked at AI data companies or frontier labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, or similar.
What you'll do:
- Co-design model capabilities by identifying gaps in frontier models, running headroom analyses, and defining areas of improvement alongside researchers at top AI labs
- Run experiments and benchmarks using internal simulation infrastructure and open-source tooling (e.g., Oddish) to evaluate model performance and hillclimb on specific verticals
- Translate customer requirements into action — take vague asks from partner labs, break them into research questions, and organize internal teams to hit aggressive delivery timelines
- Design and manage data curation pipelines — recruit and coordinate external domain experts, or work with research engineers to build synthetic data generation pipelines
- Perform literature reviews — stay current with SOTA research, read papers, and implement insights into practical training data and evaluation frameworks
- Own the full project lifecycle from research scoping through weekly data delivery, incorporating customer feedback and iterating rapidly over 1-3 month project cycles
- Bridge research and operations — communicate technical findings to non-technical contributors and translate user/enterprise pain points into evaluation and training data
About Abundant
AI models rely on two fundamental ingredients: compute and data. Abundant is building the NVIDIA of training data. NVIDIA, the leader in compute, has a peak market cap of $5T and generated $130B in revenue last year as the need for scaling compute has exploded. We believe the need to scale data is just beginning, as we move beyond SFT and human supervision to RL and Learning from Experience.
Our founding team consists of former founders, ML engineers, roboticists and data leads from Waymo, Google, Mercor and AWS. Our team has previously worked with DeepMind to deploy deep learning models at 1B user scale, trained SOTA models for self-driving at Waymo, and scaled data pipelines of tens of thousands of human annotators at YouTube. Our pioneering work in human computation, synthetic data, simulation and RL give us the advantage in delivering results to our customers.
Why now? Training data is more important and more scarce than ever before. Scaling laws dictate that linear improvement in model performance demands an exponential increase in training data. But there is only one World Wide Web and most of it has already been trained on. The next advances will require major advances in simulation, synthetic data and learning from experience.
What happens if we succeed? Abundant will be the core enabler for not only AGI, but ASI and physical intelligence. Most of the challenges in model algorithms and compute are already solved. What’s missing? The data necessary to move from general knowledge to domain expertise; from chatbots to agents; and from text to multimodal and physical AI. Ask any AI researcher or roboticist: the core bottleneck to progress is the availability of data, hence “abundant data”.
Required skills
Other roles at Abundant
Research Fellow
San Francisco, DublinContractMember of Technical Staff, Platform Engineering
Dublin, IrelandFull-timeMember of Technical Staff, Research (EU)
Dublin, IrelandFull-timeMember of Technical Staff, Research
San Francisco, DublinFull-timeMember of Technical Staff, Platform Engineering
San Francisco, United StatesFull-time
Job details
Salary
$150,000 - $240,000
Location
San Francisco, United States
Experience
0+ years
Funding
Total raised
$1.1M
Last stage
Pre-seed
Investors
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.
