Director of AI Research – Large Language Models (LLMs) & Foundation Models

Recruits Lab; United States; Remote; USD 220,000 - 340,000; Full time

Job summary

Recruits Lab in the United States is seeking a Director of AI Research to lead the development of large language models and foundation models from scratch. You will architect, pretrain, and steer long-term AI research for scalable worldwide deployment.

You will manage researchers, tackle training stability, scaling laws, and efficiency across multi-GPU clusters, while advancing model performance and research leadership in a cutting-edge field.

Qualifications

• Must Have: Proven hands-on experience pretraining large-scale LLMs or foundation models from scratch.
• Deep expertise in transformers, deep learning, model architecture, and optimization.
• Strong knowledge of RoPE, GQA, MoE, attention mechanisms, and scaling laws.
• Experience with distributed GPU training, FSDP, DeepSpeed ZeRO, tensor parallelism, or pipeline parallelism.
• Hands-on experience with BF16/FP8, gradient checkpointing, and training stability.
• Demonstrated research leadership and a track record of driving technical innovation.

Responsibilities

• Build Foundation Models: lead architecture, development, and pretraining of large-scale LLMs from scratch.
• Advance AI Research: drive innovation in transformers, MoE, and emerging architectures.
• Solve Complex Challenges: tackle training stability, convergence, scaling laws, and optimization across large GPU clusters.
• Push Model Performance: improve training efficiency, generalization, inference speed, and scalability.
• Lead Technical Innovation: guide researchers, influence architecture, and drive long-term AI research strategy.

Skills

LLM pretraining

Transformers & DL

Model architecture

Distributed GPU training

BF16/FP8 & checkpointing

Research leadership

Tools

DeepSpeed

FSDP

Tensor parallelism

MoE

RoPE / GQA

Job description

Director of AI Research – Large Language Models (LLMs) & Foundation Models

Build the Next Generation of AI. Lead Research That Changes What's Possible.

Location: Remote | United States

The Opportunity

We're partnering with a global AI technology innovator pushing the boundaries of large language models (LLMs), foundation models, and next-generation generative AI.

We're seeking an exceptional Director of AI Research who has personally designed, built, and trained large-scale foundation models from scratch.

This isn't about fine-tuning existing models or building AI applications. It's about creating the foundational intelligence powering tomorrow's technology.

You'll lead ambitious research, solve complex challenges at scale, and help shape the future of AI systems deployed worldwide.

What You'll Do

• Build Foundation Models: Lead the architecture, development, and pretraining of large-scale LLMs and foundation models from scratch.
• Advance AI Research: Drive innovation in transformers, attention mechanisms, mixture-of-experts (MoE), and emerging architectures.
• Solve Complex Challenges: Tackle training stability, convergence, scaling laws, and optimization across large GPU clusters.
• Push Model Performance: Improve training efficiency, model generalization, inference speed, and computational scalability.
• Lead Technical Innovation: Guide advanced researchers, influence architectural decisions, and drive long-term AI research strategy.

What You'll Bring

• Must Have: Proven hands-on experience pretraining large-scale LLMs or foundation models from scratch.
• Deep expertise in transformers, deep learning, model architecture, and optimization.
• Strong knowledge of RoPE, GQA, MoE, attention mechanisms, and scaling laws.
• Experience with distributed GPU training, FSDP, DeepSpeed ZeRO, tensor parallelism, or pipeline parallelism.
• Hands-on experience with BF16/FP8, gradient checkpointing, and training stability.
• Demonstrated research leadership and a track record of driving technical innovation.

Bonus: Multimodal foundation models, RLHF, DPO, GRPO, or significant contributions to advanced AI research.

Why Join?

The next generation of AI won't be built by simply calling an API.

This is your opportunity to lead breakthrough research, influence the architecture of next-generation foundation models, and solve some of the most challenging problems in artificial intelligence.