Lead Research Engineer, Data Quality

About HUDHUD's mission is to build reliable, fair and open infrastructure for AI data. We want data to be valuable for the people who create it and trustworthy for the labs that train on it. Our team is a quickly growing group of researchers, engineers and operators building the economy that shapes what AI will become. Backed by $16M from top VCs and YC (W25), our marketplace and platform are used by startups, Fortune 500 companies and frontier labs.About the roleWe’re looking for a Lead Research Engineer, Data Quality to own how HUD measures, improves, and scales the quality of training data for frontier agents. You’ll lead the data quality team in building the systems that evaluate thousands of tasks across RL environments, synthetic data, benchmarks, and domain-specific workflows.ResponsibilitiesLead HUD’s data quality strategy including building QC systems, defining and enforcing quality standards, and designing experiments to grade agent outputsDevelop new methods for validating synthetic data at scale, such as failure-mode analysis, task mutation checks, and trajectory auditingPartner with research engineers, domain experts, and data vendors to diagnose quality issues and improve data generation workflowsTurn qualitative research insights into production systems, internal tools, dashboards, validation pipelines, and feedback loopsHelp build internal research taste around what makes agent training data actually useful, not just superficially correctMentor other research engineers to maintain a high bar for technical rigor, clarity, and execution speedExperienceYou may be a good fit if you have:Advanced proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environmentsDeep intuition for data quality - you can reason about what makes tasks realistic, learnable, diverse, reliable, and useful for trainingExperience building QC systems, evals, benchmarks, synthetic data pipelines, validation workflows, or model evaluation infrastructureComfort working across messy human and technical systems, including domain experts, vendors, generated data, model outputs, graders, and infrastructureStrong written communication and the ability to explain methodology clearly to researchers, engineers, labs, and external audiencesStrong candidates may also have:Experience leading teams on ambiguous technical projects from problem definition through implementation and iterationExperience working with subject-matter experts to capture domain judgment and convert it into scalable review or generation systemsBe comfortable designing metrics, experiments, and QA/QC processes, not just executing themEarly-stage startup experience with ability to work independently in fast-paced environmentsBe detail-oriented and able to spot subtle inconsistencies or edge cases in dataTeam & company detailsTeam Size: ~25 people currently, mostly full-time in-person, but some remote.Our team: Our team includes 4 International Olympiad medalists (IOI, ILO, IPhO), serial AI startup founders, and researchers with publications at ICLR, NeurIPS, etc.Company stage: We have 8 figures in funding and are scaling profitably and quickly to meet very strong demand.LogisticsEmployment: Full-time.Location: We have offices in San Francisco or Singapore but are open to remote candidates who can work hours that 70-80% overlap with either San Francisco or Singapore time zones.Visa Sponsorship: We provide support for relocation and visas for strong full-time candidates to the US or Singapore.Timeline: Applications are rolling. The process is 2 technical interviews and a 2-3 day work trial.What we offerCompetitive compensation100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision (US and Singapore employees)Lunch and dinner for in-office employeesCompany-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day) on top of PTO and paid holidaysOther perks including an Equinox membership, 401k, and commuter benefits (US employees) and a health/wellness stipend (Singapore employees)Unlimited* access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc. *By unlimited, we mean no one on our token usage leaderboard has ever hit a limit. So we have no idea what the limit is.Two top-floor offices in San Francisco’s Union Square and Singapore’s Raffles PlaceAnnual travel budget to visit either officeCompensationActual offers are adjusted for experience and location, but our base salary bands areSan Francisco (and other major US cities): $200,000 - $295,000Singapore: $150,000 - $225,000Rest of world: $120,000 - $225,000Due to high volume, we may not actively respond to every application, but feel free to contact us at recruiting@hud.so or elsewhere if we missed your application!