Special Projects, Research Operations

Job Description

Job Description

Magic’s mission is to build safe AGI that accelerates humanity’s progress on the world’s most important problems. We believe the most promising path to safe AGI lies in automating research and code generation to improve models and solve alignment more reliably than humans can alone. Our approach combines frontier-scale pre-training, domain-specific RL, ultra-long context, and inference-time compute to achieve this goal.

About the role :

Magic is building a new operations team to help train our next frontier model, and we’re moving at warp speed. As Special Projects, Research Operations, you’ll be one of the first operators standing up high-intensity human-in-the-loop workflows that teach our models in a handful of high-impact domains. You’ll work directly with researchers and engineers to build, debug, and scale systems that don’t exist yet.

This role is part builder, part firefighter, part project manager. You’ll be joining in the very first days of a mission-critical effort, with the chance to help shape not just this project, but the way AGI gets trained.

What you might work on :

Design and operate systems that coordinate human experts to train cutting-edge AI models

Own operational workflows end to end : from data pipeline QA to expert onboarding to tool selection

Collaborate daily with researchers, engineers, and product thinkers to identify blockers and break them down

Use data to prioritize what’s breaking, what’s scaling, and what needs redesigning

Stand up new expert domains, define success criteria, recruit domain experts, and bootstrap task flows

Help shape the early culture and playbooks of the Research Ops team

What we’re looking for :

You thrive in ambiguity and love building from scratch

You’re intensely reliable and take pride in owning outcomes

You move fast and unblock yourself faster, whether with code, Notion, or a spreadsheet

You’re a systems thinker with a bias for action

You enjoy working closely with engineers and can hold your own in technical discussions

Nice to Haves :

Experience in startups, labs, or fast-paced technical environments

Background in operations, technical program management, or founder / early-team roles

Basic coding, scripting, or analytics fluency (Python, SQL, etc.)

Experience managing contractors, vendors, or subject-matter experts

Deep curiosity about how AGI gets built

Why Join Magic?

If successful, you'll be part of a ~50-person team that trained a frontier model from scratch. You’ll get the speed and ownership of a founding team, the ambition of an AGI moonshot, and the chance to build the infrastructure behind one of the most important technologies of our time.

Our culture :

Integrity. Words and actions should be aligned

Hands-on. At Magic, everyone is building

Teamwork. We move as one team, not N individuals

Focus. Safely deploy AGI. Everything else is noise

Quality. Magic should feel like magic

Compensation, benefits and perks (US) :

Annual salary range : $230K - $250K

Equity is a significant part of total compensation, in addition to salary

401(k) plan with 6% salary matching

Generous health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents

Unlimited paid time off

Visa sponsorship and relocation stipend to bring you to SF, if possible

A small, fast-paced, highly focused team