Abaka AI · 11 hours ago
Research Partnerships Manager
Palo Alto, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Mid, Senior Level
$175K/yr - $275K/yrAbaka AI is a trusted data partner for AI companies, serving over 1,000 industry leaders. The Research Partnerships Manager will strengthen and scale academic and business collaborations, focusing on understanding client needs and curating customized solutions while engaging with researchers and academic labs.
Data Collection and LabelingMachine LearningNatural Language Processing
Responsibilities
Play an active role in shaping Abaka’s research-facing strategy, including identifying high-impact research directions, datasets, and benchmarks
Build and maintain relationships with research labs, academic researchers, and professors across AI-related fields, particularly those aligned with Abaka’s research priorities
Leverage existing academic and research networks to identify high-potential collaboration opportunities
Support academic partnership discussions after initial engagement by the Business Development team
Conduct targeted cold outreach to researchers and labs in a professional and ethical manner aligned with academic and institutional norms
Represent Abaka AI at academic conferences, workshops, and research events, actively expanding visibility within the research community
Develop a strong understanding of academic lab structures, advisor–student pipelines, and researcher career trajectories
Stay current on research trends across areas such as LLMs, multimodal models, reasoning systems, and embodied AI
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
Share insights from the academic research ecosystem to inform partnership strategy, dataset development, and outreach efforts
Qualification
Required
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
Benefits
Equity
Comprehensive benefits package (health, dental, vision, PTO, flexible work schedule)
Company
Abaka AI
Abaka AI is a leading AI company and we are committed to becoming the data partner in artificial intelligence industry.
Founded in 2021
51-200 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Abaka AI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (2)
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageLeadership Team
Minyi (Crystal) Chen
North American Business Partner
Company data provided by crunchbase