Research Scientist, Open Benchmarks Red Team

About the Role

Snorkel AI is hiring researchers to support the Open Benchmarks Red Team program.

Frontier AI benchmarks can contain grading failures, exploitable shortcuts, and task errors that make results unreliable. We're looking for a Research Scientist / Research Engineer to identify benchmark weaknesses, help develop and validate fixes, and create reusable methods to improve benchmark quality across tasks and datasets.

This is a hands-on research role combining AI evaluation, adversarial testing, practical benchmark repairs, and close collaboration with benchmark authors. You'll share findings with benchmark authors, work together on fixes, and help get improved benchmark versions adopted.

What You'll Do

• Red-team frontier benchmarks: Identify and reproduce issues such as reward hacking, grader failures, task ambiguity, shortcuts, and environment vulnerabilities.
• Develop benchmark repairs: Propose next steps for validated issues, implement selected fixes with benchmark authors, and verify fixes without breaking valid solutions.
• Develop reusable methods: Reuse existing tools where possible and develop new checks to detect recurring benchmark weaknesses.
• Collaborate with benchmark authors: Review findings with benchmark authors before publication, collaborate on repairs, and support official improved releases.
• Drive research impact: Contribute to technical reports, open-source tools, publications, and new approaches to benchmark evaluation and improvement.

What We're Looking For

• Strong research or engineering background in machine learning, LLMs, AI agents, and evaluation.
• Strong Python programming skills and experience building, running, and debugging AI agents or evaluation systems.
• Ability to identify weaknesses in existing evaluation methods, develop new approaches, and rigorously test whether they work.
• Experience designing rigorous experiments, analyzing model behavior, and investigating unexpected failures.
• Familiarity with LLM/agent benchmarks, evaluation frameworks, or automated grading systems.
• Experience independently driving research and engineering projects from problem identification through implementation and validation.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.

Nice to Have

• Experience with adversarial testing, red teaming, reward hacking, or specification gaming.
• Experience developing or evaluating benchmarks for coding agents, computer use, professional workflows, etc.
• Familiarity with RL environments, agent trajectories, verifiers, and evaluation infrastructure.
• Open-source contributions or publications in AI evaluation, robustness, or agentic systems.
• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent research/industry experience.

Additional information

Actual compensation will be determined based on factors including skills, qualifications, experience, and geographic location.

Pay and benefits

Salary range(s) for this role $198,000 - $340,000 USD

Be Your Best at Snorkel

Joining Snorkel AI means becoming part of a company that has market proven solutions, robust funding, and is scaling rapidly-offering a unique combination of stability and the excitement of high growth. As a member of our team, you'll have meaningful opportunities to shape priorities and initiatives, influence key strategic decisions, and directly impact our ongoing success.

Whether you're looking to deepen your technical expertise, explore leadership opportunities, or learn new skills across multiple functions, you're fully supported in building your career in an environment designed for growth, learning, and shared success.