Frontier ML Research Engineer: Data, Evals & Scaling

Periodic Labs; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Periodic Labs in Menlo Park, CA is hiring a Midtraining Research Engineer to enhance scientific reasoning in frontier models. You will curate data, generate synthetic data, and run large-scale training experiments with thousands of GPUs, collaborating with physicists and chemists.

We sponsor visas; compensation ranges from $250,000 to $350,000 plus equity. Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience, located in Menlo Park, CA.

Qualifications

• Experience training LLMs on curated mixes of trillions of tokens.
• Experience on a dedicated evals team supporting a large production training run.
• Hands-on use of self-distillation, on-policy distillation, or similar methods in a real training pipeline.
• Experience with scaling laws and compute-optimal hyperparameters.
• Comfort working across data, evals, and training infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Identify, process, and curate novel data sources for large-scale model training.
• Generate synthetic data to fill gaps in scientific knowledge and reasoning.
• Build evaluations that correlate with downstream task performance, collaborating with RL researchers and scientists.
• Develop and apply distillation techniques to improve model capability.
• Design and run large-scale training experiments across thousands of GPUs.
• Build tools to investigate how data choices shape model intelligence.

Skills

LLM training

Evals team experience

Self-distillation

On-policy distillation

Scaling laws

Hyperparameter tuning

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

GPU clusters

Job description

Periodic Labs in Menlo Park, CA is hiring a Midtraining Research Engineer to enhance scientific reasoning in frontier models. You will curate data, generate synthetic data, and run large-scale training experiments with thousands of GPUs, collaborating with physicists and chemists.

We sponsor visas; compensation ranges from $250,000 to $350,000 plus equity. Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience, located in Menlo Park, CA.