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Open Source Research Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

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Open Source Research information

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$20.6K

$97.7K

$176.8K

How much do open source research jobs pay per year?

As of Jul 26, 2026, the average yearly pay for open source research in California is $97,679.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $53,857.00 and $137,092.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is an Open Source Research job?

An Open Source Research job involves gathering, analyzing, and interpreting publicly available data to support decision-making, investigations, or intelligence efforts. This can include examining online publications, social media, government records, and other freely accessible sources. Professionals in this field may work in cybersecurity, journalism, law enforcement, or corporate intelligence. Strong analytical skills, attention to detail, and an understanding of digital tools are essential for success in this role.

What are some of the typical challenges faced by professionals in Open Source Research roles?

Professionals in open source research often encounter challenges such as verifying the authenticity and credibility of information found online, managing large volumes of data, and keeping up with rapidly evolving digital tools and platforms. They may need to navigate language barriers, misinformation, and changing privacy regulations depending on the geographic focus of their research. The work can require a careful balance between thorough investigation and timely reporting. To succeed, researchers often collaborate with analysts, subject matter experts, and cross-functional teams to ensure findings are actionable and reliable.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive in the Open Source Research position, and why are they important?

To thrive in Open Source Research, you need strong analytical abilities, attention to detail, and a background in research methodologies, typically supported by a degree in international relations, intelligence studies, or a related field. Familiarity with research databases, online investigative tools, and sometimes certifications like OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) training are valuable. Effective communication, critical thinking, and perseverance are essential soft skills to excel in this field. These skills ensure accurate collection, assessment, and presentation of publicly available information for informed decision-making.

What are the most commonly searched types of Open Source Research jobs in California? The most popular types of Open Source Research jobs in California are:
What cities in California are hiring for Open Source Research jobs? Cities in California with the most Open Source Research job openings:
Infographic showing various Open Source Research job openings in California as of July 2026, with employment types broken down into 1% As Needed, 77% Full Time, 18% Part Time, 1% Temporary, and 3% Contract. Highlights an 95% Physical, 2% Hybrid, and 3% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $97,679 per year, or $47 per hour.
AI Advocate - Open-Source & Research

AI Advocate - Open-Source & Research

Snorkel AI

San Francisco, CA

Other

Posted 4 days ago


Job description

About the Role

You'll be Snorkel's primary technical voice in the open-source and research communities. The work spans three audiences: frontier AI research teams (post-training, RL environments, evals and benchmarks), enterprise ML and applied AI teams building specialized models on proprietary expertise, and the broader data-centric AI community.

You'll partner closely with our research, forward deployed research, and product teams to translate the methodology behind Snorkel's work into world-class technical content, open-source contributions, conference presence, and a thriving community of data-centric AI practitioners.

Success looks like: a strong Snorkel open-source presence, a steady cadence of high-signal technical writing and research artifacts, marquee presence at the conferences that matter (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AI Engineer World's Fair), and an engaged community of researchers and practitioners who view Snorkel as the trusted authority on data development for modern AI.

Responsibilities
  • Own Snorkel's external technical voice. Write methodology posts, technical deep-dives, and research-grade content on data development for frontier models. 
  • Lead Snorkel's open-source presence. Define the GTM approach, ship code, review PRs, recruit contributors, and keep the libraries credible and current. Build OSS that demonstrates Snorkel's methodology in practice, including reproducible evals and benchmark artifacts.
  • Advance the conversation on AI evaluation and benchmarking. Publish original work on how to measure agentic AI systems. Domain-specific evals, agent evals, LLM-as-judge calibration, contamination and saturation, and the connection between evals and post-training data.
  • Drive conference and research community presence. Land talks, papers, and workshops at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AI Engineer World's Fair, and the right practitioner venues. Build relationships with academic labs and AI research teams.
  • Partner with the research team. Translate what's learned in research collaborations into externally shareable methodology, case studies, and tooling.
  • Set the bar for technical credibility. Design evals and benchmarks, prototype RL environments, and write code worth using. Your authority comes from doing the work, not just talking about it.
Preferred Qualifications
  • Experience. 6+ years in applied ML research, AI engineering, developer/research advocacy, or a research-intensive technical role with significant public output. Prior DevRel/advocate experience welcome but not required.
  • Deep technical fluency in modern AI. Post-training techniques (RLHF, DPO, RLAIF), evaluation methodologies, RL environment design, training data pipelines, synthetic data generation, and at least one applied domain (coding agents, reasoning, multimodal, agents).
  • Hands-on experience with AI evaluation and benchmarks. You've built and run real evals: public benchmarks (MMLU, GPQA, SWE-bench, HELM, BIG-bench, Arena-style head-to-heads), domain-specific custom evals, and LLM-as-judge pipelines with proper calibration. 
  • You build with AI, not just about AI. A power user of frontier coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and the like) in your day-to-day workflow, and you've built non-trivial agentic systems yourself - multi-step, tool-using, with real evals and an opinion on what breaks.
  • A real public body of work. Talks, papers, blog posts, podcasts, and/or OSS contributions you can point to. Quality and signal matter more than volume.
  • Customer- and researcher-facing presence. Comfortable in a room with frontier-lab research leads or a F500 ML team; can read the room and hold technical credibility on either side.
  • Self-directed and comfortable with ambiguity. You ship without being asked, set your own quality bar, and enjoy moving at the pace of frontier AI.

Bonus: Advanced degree or sustained research output in ML/AI; prior experience at an AI lab, OSS-first AI company, or a research-driven technical org; conference program-committee or organizing experience; published or maintained a public benchmark; relationships in the post-training, evals, or RL-environments communities.