Abakaai

Research Partnerships Manager

Mountain View, CA · Full-time

Sponsorship not specified$175k-$275kDetected 77 days ago

Machine LearningData EngineeringLLMsBusiness DevelopmentCold OutreachRoboticsResearchCommunicationCollaboration

About the role

We are hiring a Research Partnerships Manager to strengthen and scale Abaka AI's academic and business collaborations.
This role sits at the intersection of research, partnerships, and business development, with a strong focus on understanding client needs and curating customized solutions.
Large Language Models (LLMs) and foundation models

Build and maintain relationships with research labs, academic researchers, and professors across AI-related fields, particularly those aligned with Abaka's research priorities.
Support academic partnership discussions after initial engagement by the Business Development team.
Conduct lightweight independent research or literature reviews to support partnership conversations and collaboration planning.
Collaborate cross-functionally with BD, research, and internal teams to align partnership goals and execution.
to be the world's most trusted data partner for AI companies.
With our headquarters in Silicon Valley-and teams in Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo-we support global partners with fast, reliable, and scalable data solutions.

Develop a strong understanding of academic lab structures, advisor-student pipelines, and researcher career trajectories.
Strong intuition for what makes a dataset, benchmark, or evaluation valuable to frontier AI models, including considerations around quality, scale, coverage, and real-world relevance
Academic background in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, or a related field.
Currently enrolled in, or recently graduated from, a PhD, Master's, or advanced undergraduate program.
Familiarity with research areas such as LLMs, multimodal learning, vision-language models, or embodied AI.
Deep understanding of the academic research ecosystem, including labs, professors, PhD pipelines, and research communities.
Existing connections within academic or research-focused networks.
Strong interpersonal and communication skills, with comfort engaging researchers through both warm introductions and cold outreach.
Highly proactive and self-driven, with a demonstrated ability to independently build and sustain professional networks.
Comfortable operating in a fast-paced startup environment with high ownership and autonomy.
Ability to balance research depth with partnership and relationship-building objectives.

Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work at Abaka AI.
The base salary range for this position is $175,000 - $275,000 USD annually.
Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate's qualifications, skills, competencies and experience.

Multimodal models, including text, image, video (video understanding and editing, not diffusion), audio, 3D, agents, and vision-language models (VLMs)
This role is eligible for equity, as well as a comprehensive benefits package (health, dental, vision, PTO, flexible work schedule).

This listing is sourced directly from Abakaai's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.