Research Scholar

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a focused project with an AfterQuery research mentor, aligned with your interests and at least one core research area.
• Formulate research questions, design rigorous experiments, and analyze the results.
• Develop the datasets, methods, evaluations, or benchmark assets the project needs.
• Document methods and results clearly and work with AfterQuery’s research and engineering teams to make the work reproducible.
• Co-author a paper and work toward publication.

Preferred

• Research publications at leading conferences or peer-reviewed journals.
• Experience developing, publishing, or contributing to public benchmarks.

Massive Opportunity

Forbes reported that we could be YC's fastest unicorn, reportedly raising at a $3.2 billion valuation, and we're not slowing down.

Founding Impact

You will own and architect core infrastructure systems that power our platform from the ground up.

Equity & Growth

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. As we scale, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the engineering organization and lead major technical initiatives.

Strong Team

• Our founding team has experience from Citadel Securities, Meta, Google, Silver Lake, and Morgan Stanley — work alongside world-class engineers and researchers.
• The AfterQuery Research Scholar program is a semester-long collaboration for students pursuing ambitious, publishable work in one of AfterQuery’s focus areas:

Data quality and data mix

Post-training research, including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning

Agent and foundation-model evaluation

Public benchmarks in coding and specialized domains such as medicine, finance, law, and STEM

Projects are shaped around each scholar’s interests, with the goal of producing a joint publication. Scholars receive weekly mentorship and hands-on support with engineering, datasets, human annotation, and compute resources. A cash award is provided if a jointly authored paper from the collaboration is accepted for publication.

Required Qualifications

• Full-time undergraduate/master/PhD student with an established publication record
• Ability to participate in an ongoing research collaboration throughout the academic semester.

Company Benefits (For Eligible Employees)

• Health Insurance: Medical, Vision, Dental
• 401(k) with Employer Match
• Daily Meals: Daily UberEats Stipend

Monthly Wellness Stipend

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to providing a workplace free from discrimination and harassment. Employment decisions are made without regard to legally protected characteristics under applicable federal, state, or local law.

We comply with applicable pay transparency requirements and provide compensation ranges based on the position, qualifications, experience, and other relevant factors. Reasonable accommodations are available to qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs, as required by law. This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of work performed and is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, qualifications, or working conditions associated with the position. We reserve the right to modify this job description as business needs change.