SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Snorkel AI is hiring a Director of Forward Deployed Research to lead a team partnering directly with frontier AI labs on their most challenging data problems. This is a player-coach role where you'll split time between people leadership (hiring, coaching, team development) and hands-on technical work on strategic accounts.
You'll set the technical bar for specification quality, build scalable playbooks and processes, and establish team culture. Key responsibilities include recruiting and developing the forward deployed research team, coaching on technical quality and customer engagement, owning SE capacity planning and account coverage, establishing team processes for discovery and spec development, leading technical conversations on select strategic accounts, and serving as escalation point for complex customer situations.
You'll partner closely with AE leadership on pipeline strategy, account coverage, and SE allocation, and work cross-functionally with Delivery, Research, and Engineering teams to ensure smooth handoffs. The ideal candidate can hold their own with frontier AI researchers, has strong presales instincts, and is excited about building and scaling a team.
Required experience includes 8+ years in applied ML, AI solutions engineering, technical presales, or research-intensive customer-facing roles, plus 5+ years managing or leading technical individual contributors in presales or solutions engineering. Strong expertise in frontier AI concepts is essential: LLMs, training data pipelines, evaluation methodologies, post-training techniques (RLHF, DPO, RLAIF), and domain areas such as coding agents, reasoning, multimodal models, or RL environments. You should have a track record of hiring and developing technical talent, experience operating against revenue or pipeline goals in GTM, excellent communication skills, and comfort working in fast-moving environments with ambiguity.
