Research Engineer

Research Engineer (LLM/Agent Startup)

Full-time | Remote | Reports to Founders

Introduction:

• Join us at Fastino as we build the next generation of LLMs and agentic systems. Our team, boasting alumni from Google Research, Apple, Stanford, and Cambridge is on a mission to develop specialized, efficient AI.

• Fastino has raised $25M (as featured in TechCrunch) through our seed round and is backed by leading investors including Microsoft, Khosla Ventures, Insight Partners, Github CEO Thomas Dohmke, Docker CEO Scott Johnston, and others.

• The Research Engineer will work closely with the two co-founders, steering discussions around research direction and roadmap.

Key Responsibilities:

• Steer Fastino model architecture and pre-training, innovating on next generation small models

• In parallel, drive research around next generation agent design, focusing on agentic personalization and proactivity

• Build data pipelines and evaluation frameworks to validate model and agent performance and behavior

• Publish research findings in academic journals, conferences, and blog posts

• Work closely with the engineering team to architect and design scalable agentic systems that serve millions of users

• Work closely with the Fastino founders to drive Fastino research direction

• Contribute to external publication efforts as appropriate; staying current with state-of-the-art in LLMs, agents, RL, planning, etc and publish research findings in academic journals, conferences, and blog posts

Requirements:

• 5+ years of professional engineering or research experience

• Ph.D. or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or related field

• Deep understanding of frontier models (autoregressive, diffusion), post-training (SFT, RLVR, RLAIF, RLHF, et al.), and their human data requirements

• Proficient in Python, data science libraries and deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow)

• Track record of publications in top-tier AI/ML venues (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.)

Why Join Us?

• Supportive Environment: Benefit from the resources of Microsoft and venture funding, collaborating with top-tier talent from renowned universities.

• Top-Tier Compute: Enjoy a dedicated GPU cluster for research.

• Impactful Work: Your contributions will directly shape the future of AI applications, making technology more accessible, eco-friendly and dev friendly!

• Competitive Benefits: Receive competitive salary, stock options, health benefits, and more.