Lead Research Engineer, Data Quality

About HUD

HUD is building infrastructure to create RL training data and evals for frontier AI agents, as well as a marketplace to sell these to frontier labs through the HUD marketplace. Our platform is used by frontier labs, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. We've raised $16M from top VCs and were YC W25.

About the role

We'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.

Responsibilities

• Lead HUD's data quality strategy including building QC systems, defining and enforcing quality standards, and designing experiments to grade agent outputs
• Develop new methods for validating synthetic data at scale, such as failure-mode analysis, task mutation checks, and trajectory auditing
• Partner with research engineers, domain experts, and data vendors to diagnose quality issues and improve data generation workflows
• Turn qualitative research insights into production systems, internal tools, dashboards, validation pipelines, and feedback loops
• Help build internal research taste around what makes agent training data actually useful, not just superficially correct
• Mentor other research engineers to maintain a high bar for technical rigor, clarity, and execution speed

Experience

• Advanced proficiency in Python, Docker, and Linux environments
• Deep intuition for data quality - you can reason about what makes tasks realistic, learnable, diverse, reliable, and useful for training
• Experience building QC systems, evals, benchmarks, synthetic data pipelines, validation workflows, or model evaluation infrastructure
• Comfort working across messy human and technical systems, including domain experts, vendors, generated data, model outputs, graders, and infrastructure
• Strong written communication and the ability to explain methodology clearly to researchers, engineers, labs, and external audiences

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience leading teams on ambiguous technical projects from problem definition through implementation and iteration
• Experience working with subject‑matter experts to capture domain judgment and convert it into scalable review or generation systems
• Be comfortable designing metrics, experiments, and QA/QC processes, not just executing them
• Early-stage startup experience with ability to work independently in fast‑paced environments
• Be detail‑oriented and able to spot subtle inconsistencies or edge cases in data

Team & company details

• Team Size : ~15 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 high revenue growth. We're scaling profitably and quickly to meet very strong demand.

Logistics

Employment : Full-time.

Location : On-site only, for now. You can join the team in the San Francisco Bay Area or Singapore offices.

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 offer

• Competitive compensation
• 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision from Blue Shield of CA (US employees)
• Lunch and dinner when you're in the office
• Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year's Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays
• Other perks including an Equinox membership, 401k, and commuter benefits (US 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.

Due to high volume, we may not actively respond to every application, but feel free to contact us at View email address on click.appcast.io or elsewhere if we missed your application!