Forward Deployed Engineer
About the role
The Forward Deployed Engineer will sit at the intersection of Velvet's platform and the real-world operations that power it. This is a hands-on, execution-focused role.
Responsibilities
- Own data procurement: identify, recruit, and qualify participants for active data collection projects.
- Meet with researchers from top labs to build the highest quality video datasets for them.
- Write and maintain post-processing scripts that clean, validate, and package thousands of hours of video data for training world models.
- Identify and resolve operational issues — failed video uploads, payment problems, etc
- Build lightweight internal tools and automations to reduce manual work and increase throughput as we scale.
Requirements
- A technically savvy generalist with impressive professional or academic accomplishments, comfortable writing data pipelines, making deals, and meeting with top researchers.
- Someone who gets things done
- Detail-oriented and reliable when managing people and data at scale, where errors have downstream consequences.
- Comfortable working in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
Qualifications
- Background in research operations, data labeling platforms, or data collection.
- Experience building large-scale data processing pipelines.
- Background in ML research.
Skills
- Operations
- Python
- SQL
- Claude Code
Benefits
- Competitive compensation range of $175K - $200K
- Flexible benefits package
- Opportunity to work with leading startups and researchers
Pay
- 1.00% - 2.50%
Schedule
- Full-time
Benefits
- Health insurance
- Retirement plan
- Flexible work schedule
Company Culture
Velvet provides state of the art multimodal datasets and evals to frontier AI labs. Our team is comprised of former ML researchers who worked at Meta FAIR and Adobe, and we are solving important challenges in the procurement, evaluation, and enhancement of multimodal data.
Our culture is very scrappy, we work long hours and wear multiple hats. If you are looking for a one-dimensional job that involves sitting behind a desk all day and doing one task, we are not a good fit.
However, if you are a fan of the forward deployed model and are willing to travel, work on ops-heavy projects, and help train state of the art models, we may be the right company for you.
Founders
Velvet is founded by Lucas Mantovani (ex Meta FAIR) and Lucas Tucker (ex Adobe).