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Ifm-us

Research Scientist, Agentic Data & Benchmarking

Company

Ifm-us

Role

Research Scientist, Agentic Data & Benchmarking

Location

US

Job type

Full-time

Found on Mokaru

2 weeks ago

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Salary

$150k - $450k

Job description

Key responsibilities Benchmarking & evaluation

Design and run evaluations of agentic capabilities — multi-step reasoning, tool use, long-horizon planning, computer use, and safety properties — turning ambiguous notions of "intelligence" into defensible, reproducible metrics.

Build and harden evaluation harnesses so benchmarks run reliably at scale against training checkpoints, with clear signal on regressions and model health.

Run experiments characterizing how prompting, sampling, scaffolding, and environment design affect agentic performance on internal and public benchmarks.

Diagnose anomalous eval results mid-training-run — determine whether the cause is the model, the data, the harness, or the infrastructure — and communicate the answer clearly.

Agentic data

Source, generate, and curate high-quality agentic training data: trajectories, tool-use traces, and task datasets for new capabilities.

Design and scale RL environments and reward signals, and measure their impact on model performance.

Manage technical relationships with external data vendors and domain experts, evaluating data quality and iterating quickly on feedback.

Develop QA frameworks that catch reward hacking, label noise, and contamination, keeping data and benchmark quality high.

Across both

Contribute to technical reports, research publications, and open-source benchmarks and tooling.

Partner with research and product teams to translate capability goals into measurable data and evaluation artifacts.

Qualifications Academic qualifications

BS, MS, or PhD (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.

Minimum qualifications

2+ years of experience with a clear emphasis on evaluations and/or training-data curation for ML systems (related areas: LLM training/fine-tuning, RL, or distributed ML systems).

Strong Python and PyTorch development experience.

Demonstrated experience designing and deep-diving into evaluations, or curating and generating training datasets — ideally both.

Hands-on experience using LLM agents in your personal or professional work.

A habit of reading through raw data and trajectories to understand them and spot issues, and an instinct to distrust a metric until it's validated.

Preferred qualifications

Experience with reinforcement learning, reward design, or RL environment construction for LLMs.

Background in statistics and experimental design — a feel for signal-to-noise, statistical power, and contamination in evaluations.

Experience with large-scale dataset sourcing, curation, and processing, including working with external vendors or domain experts.

Strong knowledge of the literature on agent evaluation, RL, LLM reasoning, and tool use.

Experience building or operating data pipelines and evaluation infrastructure reliable at scale (e.g., PyTorch, Ray).

Experience evaluating or generating data for software-engineering or computer-use agents.

Contributions to published research, public benchmarks, and/or open-source ML software.

Representative projects •

Stand up a new agentic benchmark from scratch — define the task, build the dataset and scoring, validate against known signals, and ship a view that makes the result legible to researchers and leadership.

Build an RL environment for a new high-value capability: design the reward, generate and QA the trajectory data, and measure the lift on model performance.

Diagnose a mid-training regression: an eval suite returns anomalous numbers and you determine whether it's the model, the harness, the data, or the infrastructure.

Partner with an external data vendor or domain expert to source high-quality trajectories, then build the QA framework that keeps reward hacking and contamination out.

Take a flaky distributed eval pipeline and make it reliable — better retries, better observability, faster feedback to researchers.

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