Research Engineer - Pre-training

About the Position

Research Engineer - Pre-training

Join Prime Intellect as a Research Engineer - Pre-training to contribute to the development of the open superintelligence stack and next-gen AI models.

Role Impact

Take Prime Intellect’s next open models from architecture experiments through full pre-training runs, scaling toward 1–3T parameters. You’ll work across the model and training stack, making research decisions and fixing the systems problems that determine whether a run succeeds.

Responsibilities

• Build and extend the pre-training code in prime-rl, taking small experiments into full training runs.
• Evaluate model architecture changes, including MoE and attention designs, against model quality and training cost.
• Profile training jobs and improve end-to-end throughput, working with systems engineers on hardware-aware execution.
• Make long runs resilient to failures, with reliable checkpointing and recovery.
• Investigate training dynamics and numerical stability, checking that optimizations preserve convergence.
• Run controlled ablations to guide larger experiments, keeping the setup and results reproducible.
• Work with data and evaluation researchers on training mixtures, including midtraining and long-context experiments.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience training language models, including modifying training code and following the effects through actual runs.
• Strong Python skills and experience with PyTorch or a comparable framework, with enough systems understanding to debug distributed training.
• A practical understanding of model architectures and optimization, including their effect on convergence.
• Ability to design an ablation that answers a research question and explain what its results do and don’t show.
• Good judgment about what to investigate yourself and when to bring in a colleague.

Benefits and Perks

• Cash Compensation Range: $150-350k, including equity incentives, aligning your success with the growth and impact of Prime Intellect.
• Flexible work arrangements: Option to work remotely or in-person at our offices in San Francisco.
• Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance for international candidates.
• Quarterly team off-sites, hackathons, conferences, and learning opportunities.
• Opportunity to work with a talented, hard-working, and mission-driven team, united by a shared passion for leveraging technology to accelerate science and AI.

If you're excited about the opportunity to build the foundation for the future of decentralized AI and create a platform that empowers developers and researchers to push the boundaries of what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.

Locations

• San Francisco
• Remote

Commitment

• Full time