AI Resident at Ema
CA
$4,000from the description
Jul 30, 2026
CA
Nov 9, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A fixed-term research residency at an agentic AI startup where the resident owns a single hard problem end-to-end — writing the proposal, building the system, designing evaluations, and shipping behind a feature gate. Project areas span post-training for LLM agents (SFT, preference optimization, RL), reward modeling, data engines, eval infrastructure, and inference efficiency. The role suits strong ML practitioners — undergrad, graduate, or self-taught — who can work directly in a production codebase with a senior mentor.
Mid level · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Temporary
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“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 220 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 160–280
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $189,150 (middle half $152,859–$224,286). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 1, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
This is a research residency (internship/fixed-term), not a permanent hire. The posting says 'half/full-time for the term' with a flexible start, and compensation is quoted at $4,000/month.
No degree is required; the posting explicitly welcomes strong undergrads, grad students, and self-taught builders.
The SOC classification is a close call: the role blends ML research (15-2051) with substantial production software engineering (15-1252). It was classified as Data Scientists because the primary deliverable is ML research — post-training, reward modeling, eval design — rather than shipping product features.
The required skills section names ML fundamentals broadly and calls out Python and PyTorch explicitly. Depth in one of several ML sub-areas (post-training, reward modeling, agent systems, retrieval/memory, eval design) is required but no single sub-area is individually gated, so those sub-areas are not emitted as separate must-have skills.
Nice-to-have items (TRL/veRL/OpenRLHF, vLLM/SGLang, SFT/DPO/GRPO, multi-node GPU training, open-source publications) are listed under a clearly labeled 'Nice to have' section and are marked as preferred accordingly.
Posting is for a temporary engagement — the market benchmarks below price full-time roles, so read the comp comparison with that in mind.
Read the full posting
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