
Research & Product Lead at Sieve (San Francisco, CA)
Sieve· San Francisco, CA·
Role details
Job description
About Us
Sieve is a multi-modal lab curating the world's highest-quality training datasets — spanning video, audio, images, text, and 3D. We combine exabyte-scale data infrastructure and novel multimodal understanding techniques that push the frontier of foundation models. Video alone makes up 80% of internet traffic, and across modalities, data has become the enabling medium powering creativity, communication, gaming, AR/VR, and robotics. Sieve exists to solve the biggest bottleneck in the growth of these applications: high-quality training data.
We partner with top AI labs and did $XXM last quarter alone, as a team of ~30 people. We also raised our Series A from Tier 1 firms such as Matrix Partners, Swift Ventures, Y Combinator, and AI Grant.
Why Now
Sieve is one of the most capital-efficient teams in AI — roughly 30 people serving the world's leading AI labs across every major data modality. You'll join early, own problems end-to-end, and watch your work ship directly into the models defining the frontier.
About the Role
As a Research & Product Lead, you'll be the primary face of Sieve to our customers, top AI labs building frontier models. You'll combine deep technical fluency with strong relationship skills to manage our most important accounts, drive revenue expansion, and translate customer needs into internal priorities. This role sits at the intersection of product, applied research, and customer engagement, and requires someone equally comfortable in a technical deep-dive as they are shaping roadmap priorities or navigating a commercial conversation. Relationships are central to this role. The strongest candidates will already be plugged into the AI lab ecosystem and have trust built with the people and teams we work with.
What You'll Do
- Own and grow relationships with Sieve's top AI lab customers end-to-end, from onboarding through expansion
- Serve as the technical point of contact, understanding customer data pipelines, model training workflows, and how Sieve's datasets fit into their stack
- Translate customer feedback and requirements into clear internal briefs for engineering and data ops
- Drive renewals and upsells by identifying new dataset needs and partnership opportunities within existing accounts
- Collaborate closely with the partnerships, engineering, and data ops teams to ensure customer deliverables are met on time and at quality
- Contribute to sales processes for new customers including demos, technical scoping, and proposal development
Requirements
- Strong understanding of ML/AI workflows, particularly around data pipelines and model training
- A natural relationship builder with a strong external network, especially across AI labs and frontier model companies
- Excellent communication skills, able to translate between engineering and business audiences fluently
- Comfortable with ambiguity and moving fast in a startup environment
- In-person at our SF HQ
Nice to Have
- Existing relationships at AI labs or frontier model companies
- Background in video, media, or content-related technologies
- Prior startup experience, especially as an early hire
- Experience in product, technical operations, or a customer-facing technical role
Benefits
- 401k + Full Health Insurance
- Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner covered and your choice of snacks
- Ubers covered home
Why work at Sieve
- Culture: The company describes itself as "tight-knit, fast-moving, and deeply customer-oriented." It is a "research lab to the core," combining frontier research with infrastructure and customer partnership. [sieve.ai/about]
- Team: The team brings together experience from NVIDIA, Scale AI, Zoox, and Niantic, providing exposure to top-tier expertise in AI and infrastructure. [sieve.ai/about]
- Impact: Employees will be working on the critical layer of data for the next generation of AI models (generative media, robotics, agents), offering a rare position at the forefront of AI research. [ycombinator.com]
- Remote/Hybrid/Office: The company is based in San Francisco, CA.
- Open Roles: As of mid-2026, they are actively hiring for Applied Research Engineer, Distributed Systems Engineer, Product Engineer, and Software Engineer, with salary ranges listed as $150K - $300K depending on role and experience. [jobs.ashbyhq.com, ycombinator.com]