# Research Scientist - Post Training at AfterQuery

- Company: AfterQuery
- What the company does: AfterQuery captures how experts reason and turns real-world professional work into high-quality training data for frontier foundation models. Backed by Y Combinator.
- Company website: https://afterquery.com
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: San Francisco
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $210K to $450K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-04-14
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/afterquery/41a7fe68-6892-4d98-bb0e-857d63bd721d
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/afterquery-research-scientist-post-training/

## About the role

Your job is to prove that our data works. You will design and run training experiments that isolate the impact of our datasets on model behavior. This includes SFT and RL-based post-training, where you’ll measure how different data sources shift capability, generalization, and alignment. Working closely with partner labs, you will turn our datasets into clear, defensible evidence: this data → this improvement → under these conditions. This is experimental, high-leverage work.

## What they're looking for

- Strong familiarity with LLM training and evaluation methodologies
- Ability to design lightweight experiments, move fast, and extract actionable insights from messy results
- Comfort working across domains (you'll touch finance, software engineering, policy, and more)
- A bias toward building over theorizing
- Great candidates are undergrad research or master's research (but haven't done a phd)
- Genuine obsession with how data structure, selection, and quality drive model behavior

Tags: Research