Skylab Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Research Scientist / Machine Learning Scientist

Location:SF Bay Area/Hybrid / Remote

Type:Full-Time

About the Role:

The Clientis seeking a variety of Machine Learning Scientist to help advance how we evaluate and understand AI models. Youll help design and analyze experiments that uncover what makes models useful, trustworthy and capable through human preference signals. Your work will contribute to the scientific foundations of understanding AI at scale.

This role is deeply interdisciplinary. Youll work closely with engineers, product teams, marketing and the broader research community to develop new methods for comparing models, analyzing preference data, and disentangling performance factors like style, reasoning, and robustness. Your work will inform both the public leaderboard and the tools we provide to model developers.

If youre excited by open-ended questions, rigorous evaluation, and research thats grounded in real-world impact, youll find a meaningful home here. Were looking for:

Hands-on experience training large-scale models, including reward models, preference models, and fine-tuning LLMs with methods like RLHF, DPO, and contrastive learning.

Strong foundation in ML and statistics, with a track record of designing novel training objectives, evaluation schemes, or statistical frameworks to improve model reliability and alignment.

Fluent in the full experimental stack, from dataset design and large-batch training to rigorous evaluation and ablation, with an eye for what scales to production.

Deeply collaborative mindset, working closely with engineers to productionize research insights and iterating with product teams to align modeling goals with user needs.

Responsibilities:

Design and conduct experiments to evaluate AI model behavior across reasoning, style, robustness, and user preference dimensions

Develop new metrics, methodologies, and evaluation protocols that go beyond traditional benchmarks

Analyze large-scale human voting and interaction data to uncover insights into model performance and user preferences

Collaborate with engineers to implement and scale research findings into production systems

Prototype and test research ideas rapidly, balancing rigor with iteration speed

Author internal reports and external publications that contribute to the broader ML research community

Partner with model providers to shape evaluation questions and support responsible model testing

Contribute to the scientific integrity and transparency of theThe Clientleaderboard and tools

Who isThe Client?

Created by researchers fromUC Berkeleys SkyLab,The Clientis an open platform where everyone can easily access, explore and interact with the worlds leading AI models. By comparing them side by side and casting votes for the better response, the community helps shape a public leaderboard, making AI progress more transparent, and grounded in real-world usage.

Why Join Us?

Trusted by organizations likeGoogle,OpenAI,Meta, xAI, and more,The Clientis rapidly becoming essential infrastructure for transparent, human-centered AI evaluation at scale. With over one million monthly users and growing developer adoption, our impact is helping guide the next generation of safe, aligned AI systemsgrounded in open access and collective feedback.

Our work is regularly referenced by industry leaders pushing the frontier of safe and reliable AI.Sundar Pichai,Jeff Dean,Elon Musk, andSam Altman.

High Impact: Your work will be used daily by the worlds most advanced AI labs.

Global Reach: Develop data infrastructure powering millions of real-world evaluations, influencing AI reliability across industries at the top-tier

Exceptional Team: We are a small team of top talent fromGoogle, DeepMind, Discord,Vercel,UC Berkeley, andStanford.

Requirements:

PhD or equivalent research experience in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Statistics, or a related field

Strong understanding of LLMs and modern deep learning architectures (e.g., Transformers, diffusion models, reinforcement learning with human feedback)
Proficiency in Python and ML research libraries such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow

Demonstrated ability to design and analyze experiments with statistical rigor

Experience publishing research or working on open-source projects in ML, NLP, or AI evaluation

Comfortable working with real-world usage data and designing metrics beyond standard benchmarks

Ability to translate research questions into practical systems and collaborate across engineering and product teams

Passion for open science, reproducibility, and community-driven research

What we offer:

The cash compensation for this position has not yet been finalized. Actual compensation will depend on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and candidate location.

Competitive salary and meaningful equity

Comprehensive healthcare coverage (medical, dental, vision)

The opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI with a small, mission-driven team

A culture that values transparency, trust, and community impact

Come help build the space where anyone can explore and help shape the future of AI.