Staff AI Research Engineer (Foundation Labs)

Anterior; London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a pioneering firm at the forefront of applied research as a staff-level research engineer. This role offers the unique opportunity to bridge the gap between infrastructure and research, focusing on deploying large language models (LLMs) into production. You'll collaborate with experts to optimize systems for speed and cost, while driving performance improvements in LLM-based applications. With a culture that emphasizes in-person collaboration and flexibility, you’ll have access to a supportive environment that fosters innovation, including health benefits, free daily lunches, and a flexible vacation policy. If you have a passion for turning research into impactful solutions, this is the perfect opportunity for you.

Benefits

Health and dental benefits

Flexible vacation policy

Free office lunch

Commute coverage

Qualifications

• Expertise in deploying machine learning models into production.
• Experience hosting LLMs in distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Transform research into production-ready machine learning applications.
• Collaborate with teams to prototype and deliver innovative solutions.

Skills

Machine Learning

LLM Inference

Distributed Systems

PyTorch

JAX

Applied Research

Tools

Llama

Deepseek

Job description

Our Team

We're looking for founding team members for Anterior's Foundation Labs. Foundation Labs is Anterior's applied research arm, where "applied" means "shipped." Shipping research is difficult and involves problems that live in a gray area, somewhere between infrastructure and research. We're looking for exceptional, high-agency, staff-level research engineers who can perform LLM inference accurately at scale. You'll work with our infrastructure domain experts to deploy these systems and get your models into production.

About the Role

• You'll take applied machine learning from research papers into production

• You'll work with our senior infrastructure team to optimize these systems for speed, scale, and cost for our enterprise customers

• You'll drive our efforts to improve our LLM-based system's performance for our custom domain, including fine-tuning and/or pre-training LLMs, creating efficient agent networks, etc.

• You'll collaborate closely with product and clinical teams to rapidly prototype and deliver innovative solutions

About You

We require expertise, not necessarily years of experience, in the following:

• You've taken research into production before

• You have proven experience in hosting LLMs in distributed systems

• You've worked with open-source models like Llama/Deepseek

• You know how to get into the nuts and bolts of PyTorch/JAX

• You have experience in applied research with a product focus

Preferred but Not Required

• You have experience building large-scale online evaluation pipelines

• You have experience with deploying machine learning models with over 70B parameters or multi-GPU systems

What's in it for You?

Our culture is default in-person with flexibility, and we do what's required to help you do your best work—from refrigerators stocked with high-protein meal prep to flexible vacation policies.

You'll also enjoy the following benefits:

• Health and dental benefits

• Flexible vacation policy

• Free office lunch, every day

• We're a default in-person culture and will cover your commute