SECTION I · THE BRIEF
Brief #20376Updated 17 OCT 2026SAN FRANCISCOAshbyFOUNDERS FUND
Employbl Company Profile

Research Engineer - Pretraining

Prime Intellect democratizes AI development at scale. Our platform makes it easy to find global compute resources and train state-of-the-art models through distributed training across clusters. Collectively own the…

Location
San Francisco
Company size
10–50
Posted
Today
Via
Ashby
Section II · Full ProfileFree with an account
  • 01Comp band & equity packageLocked
  • 02Seniority & experience requirementsLocked
  • 03Interview process & rubricLocked
  • 04Hiring manager & team contextLocked
  • 05Growth trajectory in this roleLocked
  • 06Offer & decision timelineLocked

Free account · no card · 2 minutes

Research Engineer - Pretraining

Prime Intellect· San FranciscoView company profile


Job title
Research Engineer - Pretraining
Job location
San Francisco
Job description

Own Your Intelligence

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team.

Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own.

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

Take Prime Intellect’s next open models from architecture experiments through full pretraining runs, scaling toward 1–3T parameters. You’ll work across the model and training stack, making research decisions and fixing the systems problems that determine whether a run succeeds.

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, with 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.

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 don’t show.

  • Good judgment about what to investigate yourself and when to bring in a colleague.

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.

View job listing ↗
The Saturday Briefing

Get the Saturday tech briefing

New company profiles, funding moves, and who’s hiring across the market — every Saturday morning.

Prime Intellect headquarters

San Francisco, CA

Company size

10–50 employees

Founded

2024

Total raised

$70,440,585

View company profile ↗

Work at Prime Intellect? Claim its Employbl profile

Funding rounds