About Us

Essential AI is building an open platform to fuel and accelerate AI breakthroughs globally. Our open models, robust tooling, reproducible pipelines, and evaluation frameworks are designed for collaboration and contribution, empowering others to build, iterate, and innovate faster.

Essential AI's technology and products have the means to shape AI advancements while supporting scalable and sustainable business models. Powerful AIs don't trace their origins to singular breakthroughs, but from an amalgam of improvements, incremental and large. Essential AI creates the ideal environment to catalyze these advancements, enabling a steady path to sustained frontier capabilities.

The Role

The Research Engineer, Pre-Training will be responsible for designing and implementing novel pre-training approaches to create powerful foundation models that can be fine-tuned/further aligned for a variety of downstream tasks. You will work closely with various pre-training research teams to identify key challenges and opportunities, and then develop and test new pre-training techniques and architectures. This may involve exploring different model architectures, training objectives, data sources, and scaling approaches. You will also be responsible for running large-scale experiments, analyzing results, and iterating on your approaches.

What you’ll be working on

• You will be a core contributor to our research bets that advance the real-world capabilities of our models.

• You will collaborate closely across the research engineering stack to close the loop between research and execution, identify capability gaps, and evaluate progress.

• Lead long-term research initiatives focused on pre-training models. Work closely with research engineers to prototype, understand, implement, and deploy novel techniques to improve the capabilities of our models.

• Develop novel algorithms and methodologies for pre-training models, ensuring scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness.

• Design, develop, and optimize machine learning models and prototypes, ensuring high performance, scalability, and robustness.

• Stay close to the latest advancements in pre-training techniques, incorporating relevant findings into research directions.

What we are looking for

• Self-motivated and takes a proactive approach to constantly iterate by continuously experimenting, inferring, and deciding the right set of next experiments.

• Research experience with a focus on pre-training and building large language models using frameworks such as Megatron, DeepSpeed, MaxText, etc.

• You have strong ML fundamentals and first principles thinking that guides your approach to research.

• You have experience in coming up with new methods or improving existing techniques in ML or related fields

• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python and frameworks such as JAX, PyTorch or TF

• Experience with data engineering and preprocessing, in particular, optimization of data pipelines, feature engineering, and model evaluation, is beneficial.

• Strong problem-solving, analytical, communication, and collaboration skills with the ability to analyze complex datasets and derive actionable insights.

• Ability to prototype and deploy pre-trained models in production environments

• You enjoy building things from the ground up in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

  We are based in-person in SF and work fully onsite 5 days a week. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

  The base pay range for the role described in this job description is $225,000 to $250,000 based on experience for our location in San Francisco, CA. Final offer amounts depend on various job-related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews and our benchmarks against market compensation data. In addition to cash pay, full-time regular positions are eligible for equity, 401(k), health benefits, monthly wellness & education stipend, and other benefits like daily onsite lunches and snacks; some of these benefits may be available for part-time or temporary positions.

We encourage you to apply for this position even if you don’t check all of the above requirements but want to spend time pushing on these techniques.

Essential AI commits to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment, as well as equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. You may view all of Essential AI’s recruiting notices here, including our EEO policy, recruitment scam notice, and recruitment agency policy.