Research Engineer - Language Model Pre-Training

Department: R&D - Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

Zyphra is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, California.

The Role:

As a Research Engineer - Language Model Pre-Training, you'll shape our language model roadmap through end-to-end pretraining development. You will work extremely closely with our pretraining team, who will integrate your insights into our next-generation models.

You'll Work Across:

• Large-scale training runs and model parallelization

• Performance optimization of our pretraining stack

• Dataset collection, processing, and evaluation

• Architecture and methodology research, including optimizer ablations

What We're Looking For / Requirements:

• Strong engineering aptitude for rapidly implementing reliable and robust systems

• Can rapidly learn new fields and are excited to implement new ideas

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, and can work effectively on both research and engineering implementation at scale

Qualifications / Additional Skills:

• Deep expertise and intuition for solving machine learning problems and training models

• Experience with training on large-scale (multi-node) GPU clusters

• Deep understanding of model training pipelines – including model/data parallelism, distributed optimizers, etc.

• Strong grasp of proper experimental methodology for running rigorous ablations and other hypothesis testing

• Understanding of large-scale, highly parallel data processing pipelines

• High proficiency with PyTorch and Python.

• Strong ability to dive into large pre-existing codebases and rapidly get up to speed

• Published machine learning research in well-respected venues is a plus

• Postgraduate degree in a scientific subject (Computer Science, EE/EECS, Math, Physics)

Why Work at Zyphra:

• Our research methodology is to make grounded, methodical steps toward ambitious goals. Both deep research and engineering excellence are equally valued

• We strongly value new and crazy ideas and are very willing to bet big on new ideas

• We move as quickly as we can; we aim to minimize the bar to impact as low as possible

• We all enjoy what we do and love discussing AI

Benefits and Perks:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and FSA plans

• Competitive compensation and 401(k) plan

• Relocation and immigration support on a case-by-case basis

• In-office snacks and meals provided

• Unlimited PTO and company holidays

• In-person team in San Francisco with a collaborative, high-energy environment