Research Staff - Synthetic Data

About the Position

Research Staff - Synthetic Data

We are looking for a passionate Research Staff member to join our team at Mixedbread. If you are excited about the potential of synthetic data in advancing Information Retrieval systems, this role is for you.

About the Role

At Mixedbread, we are on a mission to create the next generation of Information Retrieval systems. Our research lab is focused on rethinking how search works in the era of large models. We are particularly interested in late interaction methods, multimodal retrievers, and LLM-augmented search. Synthetic data is a crucial component of our work, and we are looking for someone to help us build the best pipelines for retrieval.

Responsibilities

• Design synthetic data generation pipelines across modalities
• Lead and contribute to applied research projects in Information Retrieval
• Advance Omni, our core search platform, improving retrieval performance and efficiency
• Create innovative feedback loops to constantly improve data generation
• Collaborate across engineering and product teams to identify key areas of improvement in our models' performance and design the data necessary to bridge that gap
• Publish and share results through papers, blog posts, and conferences

Research Directions

• Late Interaction: Designing the next generation of fine-grained retrieval models beyond ColBERT
• Omni-Modality: Building retrievers that unify text, image, and beyond
• Data Refinement: Figuring out how to improve existing training datasets, modifying and filtering them to improve both training efficiency and downstream performance
• End-to-End Synthetic Pipelines: Understanding every part of the pipeline, from generation, to quality scoring, to re-writing and curating, among others. Define new components as needed.

Requirements

• Experience in information retrieval, embeddings, or related fields
• A deep interest in synthetic data pipelines and data curation work
• Proficiency in Python and ability to implement models from scratch
• Passion for advancing search beyond single-vector similarity methods
• Strong written and verbal communication skills

Nice to Have

• Publications in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, SIGIR, ACL, etc.) or high-quality blog posts
• Open-source contributions in Data, IR, NLP, or ML libraries
• Familiarity with retrieval and late interaction systems

We Offer

• Competitive compensation + equity
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• Visa sponsorship + relocation support
• Professional development budget
• Access to the best AI tools and subscriptions
• Team off-sites + conference attendance
• Transportation support
• Wellness support, including gym membership and sports club subscriptions
• Food support

About the Company

Mixedbread is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Join us in building the future of search.

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