Research Engineer - Pretraining

Prime Intellect • San Francisco, CA

2d • $150,000 - $350,000

About The Position

Prime Intellect is building an open superintelligence stack, including Lab, a full-stack platform for post-training at frontier scale. The company is developing open frontier AI models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks and the infrastructure used to build them.

As a Research Engineer - Pretraining, you will take Prime Intellect’s next open models from architecture experiments through full pretraining runs, scaling toward 1–3T parameters. You will work across the model and training stack, making research decisions and addressing systems problems that determine whether a run succeeds.

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 do not show.
• Good judgment about what to investigate independently and when to bring in a colleague.

Responsibilities

• Build and extend the pretraining 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 through 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.

Benefits

• Cash compensation range of $150,000–$350,000, including equity incentives.
• Flexible work arrangements, with the option to work remotely or in person at 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, mission-driven team.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed