Scientific Content Lead

Arena

Scientific Content Lead defining and defending scientific credibility at Arena Intelligence. Collaborating with researchers and translating evaluation science into public communication and content.

Posted 4/12/2026full-timeBay Area • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesSeniorWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own Arena’s scientific communications strategy, ensuring that our evaluation methodology, benchmarks, and data quality practices are clearly understood and accurately represented externally.
Lead Arena’s proactive data quality narrative, defending against common critiques and mischaracterizations through transparency, evidence, and high-integrity storytelling.
Develop canonical explanations of Arena’s measurement approach, including Bradley-Terry-Luce-style ranking, confidence intervals, and uncertainty-aware interpretation.
Ensure that Arena’s leaderboards are communicated responsibly: rankings are statistical estimates, small differences are often noise, and uncertainty must be preserved in public interpretation.
Anticipate, track, and respond to methodological critiques, especially around contamination, overfitting, gaming, distribution shift, and evaluation validity.
Partner closely with researchers to translate technical work into rigorous public materials, including methodology documentation, research posts, and open-source releases.
Support Arena’s Academic Partnerships Program, strengthening scientific connectivity through collaborations, citations, and peer-reviewed credibility.
Create briefing materials for high-stakes audiences, including frontier AI labs, policymakers, analysts, and enterprise partners, ensuring that technical nuance survives external scrutiny.
Serve as a scientific editor and reviewer across external communications, stress-testing claims before they become public narratives.

Requirements

What you’ll need

8-10 years of experience in AI/ML, evaluation, research, or scientific communications, with deep familiarity in how frontier model performance is measured and debated.
Strong technical background in machine learning, benchmarking, or model evaluation, with the credibility to engage directly with leading labs and researchers.
Exceptional writing and communication skills, especially the ability to explain complex methodology clearly without oversimplifying or overstating conclusions.
Track record of producing scientifically rigorous external-facing work, such as technical publications, evaluation reports, methodology documentation, or research translation.
Deep comfort operating in ambiguity, where uncertainty, tradeoffs, and limitations must be communicated transparently rather than smoothed over.
High editorial judgment and the ability to identify where scientific nuance is most likely to be misunderstood or weaponized.
Collaborative mindset and experience partnering across research, product, policy, and communications teams.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Comprehensive health and wellness benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and additional support programs.
Competitive compensation and equity aligned to the markets where our team members are based.
The opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI with a small, mission-driven team.
A culture that values transparency, trust, and community impact.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

machine learningbenchmarkingmodel evaluationBradley-Terry-Luce-style rankingconfidence intervalsuncertainty-aware interpretationscientific communicationsevaluation methodologydata quality practicesresearch translation

Soft Skills

exceptional writingcommunication skillshigh editorial judgmentcollaborative mindsetability to operate in ambiguitytransparencyscientific storytellingcritical thinkingattention to detailability to engage with researchers