Research Engineer - Pre-training Data

Own Your Intelligence

Prime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators, including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more. We are looking for people who want to build at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a category that does not fully exist yet.

Role Impact

Build the data behind Prime Intellect’s next generation of open models. You’ll find valuable sources, turn them into training-ready corpora, and work with researchers to test what actually improves the model. Your work will shape both broad pre-training and the data used to develop reasoning, coding, and long-context capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Find, evaluate, and collect valuable training data from web, code, and technical sources.
• Build scalable pipelines that turn raw data into training-ready corpora through extraction, cleaning, deduplication, and filtering.
• Develop checks for data quality, coverage, and contamination, and use them to improve collection and processing.
• Work with researchers on data mixtures and sampling strategies for pre-training and midtraining.
• Prepare and evaluate data for long-context learning, reasoning, and coding, testing synthetic data where it proves useful.
• Run controlled data experiments and use model evaluations to decide which sources, mixtures, and processing choices are worth scaling.
• Make large-scale data processing efficient, reproducible, and recoverable, with clear source provenance and dataset versioning.

Requirements

• Strong programming skills in Python and a record of building reliable data-processing or distributed systems.
• Experience working with large datasets and managing the practical tradeoffs of storage, compute, throughput, and reproducibility.
• Ability to diagnose data-quality issues and translate research goals into measurable checks and experiments.
• Comfort owning an evolving technical problem end to end and working closely with researchers to test assumptions and improve the system.

Relevant experience may include:

• Web crawling, document extraction, code-data collection, or large-scale corpus curation.
• Deduplication, text classification, quality scoring, synthetic data, or training-data contamination analysis.
• Data-mixture experiments, curriculum learning, or measuring how dataset changes affect model performance.

Nice to have

• Experience preparing datasets for language-model pre-training, continued pre-training, or midtraining.
• Work with distributed processing frameworks such as Spark, Ray, or comparable systems.
• Experience with multilingual, mathematical, scientific, or repository-level code data.
• Familiarity with tokenization, training data loaders, and the needs of large model-training runs.

Depth in data acquisition, scalable processing, or data research can be a strong starting point. We don’t expect every candidate to have worked across all of them.

Benefits and Perks

• Cash Compensation Range of $150-350k, including equity incentives, aligning your success with the growth and impact of Prime Intellect.
• Flexible work arrangements, with the 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.