Velvet
Bringing data realism to frontier models.
Forward Deployed Engineer
About the role
Skills: Operations, Python, SQL, Claude Code
Velvet is a data research company founded by Lucas Mantovani (ex Meta FAIR) and Lucas Tucker (ex Adobe). Our mission is to make AI more human by producing high quality audiovisual datasets for frontier labs.
We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to sit at the intersection of our platform and the real-world operations that power it. This is a hands-on, execution-focused role. You will own the end-to-end lifecycle of getting people onto our platform, procuring the data we need, and writing the scripts that turn collected footage into clean, usable training data.
What you'll do
- 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.
Who you are
- 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
Even better if you have
- Background in research operations, data labeling platforms, or data collection.
- Experience building large-scale data processing pipelines.
- Background in ML research.
You will thrive in this role if
- You are energized by operational work that has immediate, visible impact.
- You treat broken processes as engineering problems worth solving properly.
- You hold yourself to a high bar for data quality, knowing this determines model performance.
About Velvet
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.
