Job Details

MTS: Senior Research Scientist/Engineer, Pre-Training

About Us

We believe that a small, focused team of motivated individuals can create outsized breakthroughs. We are building an open platform to fuel and accelerate AI breakthroughs globally. Essential AI's technology and products have the means to shape AI advancements while supporting scalable and sustainable business models.

The Role

The Research Engineer, Pre-Training will be responsible for designing and implementing novel pre-training approaches to create powerful foundation models that can be fine‑tuned/further aligned for a variety of downstream tasks. You will work closely with various pre‑training research teams to identify key challenges and opportunities, and then develop and test new pre‑training techniques and architectures. This may involve exploring different model architectures, training objectives, data sources, and scaling approaches. You will also be responsible for running large‑scale experiments, analyzing results, and iterating on your approaches.

What you'll be working on

• You will be a core contributor to our research bets that advance the real‑world capabilities of our models.
• You will collaborate closely across the research engineering stack to close the loop between research and execution, identify capability gaps, and evaluate progress.
• Lead long‑term research initiatives focused on pre‑training models. Work closely with research engineers to prototype, understand, implement, and deploy novel techniques to improve the capabilities of our models.
• Develop novel algorithms and methodologies for pre‑training models, ensuring scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness.
• Design, develop, and optimize machine learning models and prototypes, ensuring high performance, scalability, and robustness.
• Stay close to the latest advancements in pre‑training techniques, incorporating relevant findings into research directions.

What we are looking for

• Research experience with a focus on pre‑training and building large language models using frameworks such as Megatron, DeepSpeed, MaxText, etc.
• Strong ML fundamentals and first‑principles thinking that guides your approach to research.
• Experience in coming up with new methods or improving existing techniques in ML or related fields.
• Experience with improving and curating data used during pre‑training. For example, curating and selecting data sources to maximize the learning of our models.
• Proficiency in programming languages commonly used in machine learning research, such as Python.
• Strong problem‑solving, analytical, communication, and collaboration skills.
• Enjoy building things from the ground up in a fast‑paced, collaborative environment.

We encourage you to apply for this position even if you don't meet all of the above requirements, but want to work on these techniques.

We are based in‑person in SF and work fully onsite 5 days a week. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

The base pay range for the role described in this job description is $225,000 to $250,000 based on experience for our location in San Francisco, CA. Final offer amounts depend on various job‑related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews and our benchmarks against market compensation data. In addition to cash pay, full‑time regular positions are eligible for equity, 401(k), health benefits, monthly wellness & education stipend, and other benefits like daily onsite lunches and snacks; some of these benefits may be available for part‑time or temporary positions.