Pre-training Research Engineer
- Salary
- $165K - $225K
- Level
- Senior
- Work type
- On-site · San Francisco
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 2 October 2026.
About the role
Sciforium is an AI infrastructure company developing next-generation multimodal AI models and a proprietary, high-efficiency serving platform. Backed by multi-million-dollar funding and direct sponsorship from AMD with hands-on support from AMD engineers the team is scaling rapidly to build the full stack powering frontier AI models and real-time applications.
About the role
As a Pre-training Research Engineer, you’ll focus on model implementation, pertaining and scaling, and improving the quality of our byte-native and multimodal foundation models. You’ll build and iterate quickly on research ideas, contribute production-grade training code and infrastructure, and help deliver high-quality base models that can serve real-world use cases at scale.
Key Responsibilities
Pre-training & Scaling
- Train large byte-native and multimodal foundation models across massive, heterogeneous corpora.
- Implement and evaluate new model architectures, training objectives, and optimization methods.
- Develop stable pre-training recipes and run scaling experiments for novel architectures.
- Conduct ablations and analyze training dynamics, model behavior, and base-model quality.
- Work with data and distributed training engineers to improve training efficiency, reliability, and scalability.
Must-Haves
- 5+ years of experience in machine learning research or engineering, with a proven track record of developing and pre-training large language or multimodal foundation models.
- Software Engineering: Strong general software engineering skills, with the ability to write robust and performant training code.
- ML Foundations: Solid understanding of deep learning fundamentals and modern pre-training methods and literature.
- Research and Experimentation: Ability to quickly implement research ideas and evaluate them using clear baselines, ablations, metrics, and analysis.
- GPU and Distributed Training: Hands-on experience running training workloads in GPU-based environments, with familiarity with distributed training.
- Education: MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, or a related field.
Nice-to-Haves
- PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, or a related field.
- JAX Ecosystem: Extensive experience with the JAX, Flax, and XLA stack.
- Large-Scale Distributed Training: Experience with multi-node pre-training using systems such as FSDP, ZeRO, or Megatron.
- Training Recipes and Scaling: Experience developing training recipes, ablations, or scaling experiments.
- Monitoring and Reproducibility: Experience owning end-to-end training and evaluation pipelines with monitoring and reproducibility.
Education
- MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, or a related field.
Benefits include
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401k plan
- Daily lunch, snacks, and beverages
- Flexible time off
- Competitive salary and equity
Sciforium's standard text
Equal opportunity
Sciforium is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
Deep Learning
Rare in Sciforium's other 11 open postings.
In most of Sciforium's ads
Machine Learning
Named in most of its open postings, whatever the role.
92% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Sciforium's standard text, folded away below.
Read against Sciforium's other open postings on this site.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 12 open in Engineering. 3 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in November: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Python (10 of 12), LLM (8 of 12), Machine Learning (8 of 12), CUDA (6 of 12), C++ (5 of 12), Kubernetes (5 of 12), PyTorch (5 of 12)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- GPU Kernel Engineer posted Oct 12
- Senior HPC & GPU Infrastructure Engineer posted Oct 6
- Foundation Model Data Engineer posted Sep 28
- Research Engineer - Model Evaluation & MLOps posted Aug 31
- Distributed Training and Inference Engineer posted Aug 24
- Lead Software Engineer, Model Serving Platform posted Aug 17
- Software Engineer, Fullstack posted Aug 7
- GPU Cluster Engineer, Networking posted Aug 6
- GPU Cluster Engineer, Systems & Platform posted Aug 6
- GPU Cluster Engineer, Hardware Operations posted Jul 8
- Senior AI Serving Engineer, Backend posted Nov 15
From the team and dates on Sciforium's own job board.
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