Research Engineer
- Salary
- $275K - $550K
- Level
- Mid
- Work type
- On-site · San Francisco
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 2 October 2026.
About the role
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
As a Research Engineer, you’ll work on training, evaluating, and serving large AI models and new inference-time compute techniques, build internet-scale datasets, and help prototype new research and product ideas.
What you'll work on
- Optimize inference throughput for novel model architectures
- Contribute to frameworks used for our research and production workloads
- Train trillion-parameter models on large GPU clusters
- Curate post-training datasets to improve targeted capabilities
- Build out internet-scale data pipelines and crawlers
- Design, prototype, and optimize new model architectures
- Contribute to research across long-context, inference-time compute, RL, and more
What we’re looking for
- Strong general software engineering skills
- Thorough knowledge of the deep learning literature
- Experience with pre- and post-training of LLMs
- Ability to come up with and evaluate research ideas
- Experience working with large distributed systems
- Ability to handle large ETL workloads
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
Magic strives to be the place where high-potential individuals can do their best work. We value quick learning and grit just as much as skill and experience.
Compensation, benefits, and perks (US)
- Annual salary ranges between $275K - $550K based on experience
- 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
The team: ML
This role is one of 5 open in ML.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Deep Learning (2 of 5)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Member of Technical Staff, Pre-training Systems posted Feb 28
- Member of Technical Staff, Inference & RL Systems posted Feb 28
- Member of Technical Staff, RL Research & Environments posted Nov 8
- Member of Technical Staff, Kernels posted Jan 24
From the team and dates on Magic's own job board.
Salary context
27 other open postings titled Research Engineer state a salary: median USD 180,000 to USD 300,000 a year.
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