Research Engineer [ Data Engineering ]

Metamorphic; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Metamorphic is building a boundary between research and systems engineering to handle ultra‑large multimodal data for foundation model training and evaluation. You will design and implement a state‑of‑the‑art dataloading stack, ensuring high throughput, reliability, and observability across GPU clusters.

You will work on data formatting, preprocessing, filtering, sharding, caching, and streaming with substantial autonomy to shape core technical decisions in a small, high‑impact team.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in CS, ML, neuroscience, or related field.
• Strong Python and PyTorch skills.
• Experience building high-throughput data pipelines for large-scale ML.
• Experience with multimodal and time-series data.
• Video processing at scale: decoding and I/O optimization.
• Experience profiling data systems: throughput, GPU utilization, memory.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end dataloading stack for training and evaluation at scale.
• Design and implement data formatting, preprocessing, filtering, sharding, caching, and streaming.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Data pipelines

Multimodal time-series

Video processing

Performance profiling

Education

Bachelors in CS/ML/Neuroscience

Job description

About Metamorphic

Metamorphic is developing new approaches to intelligence by combining machine learning with large‑scale experimental neuroscience, informed by the principles that make the brain efficient, flexible, and robust. We are building foundation models trained on rich, continuous neural data—a high‑resolution model of the brain at a scale never before possible. Our founding team spans machine learning, neuroscience, and neurotechnology, with prior work including the MICrONS project, Neuropixels, and the Enigma project, as well as foundational scientific contributions in learning, neural computation, and generative modeling. Our work sits at the frontier of AI research, and we believe the highest‑impact discoveries will come from researchers and engineers working as a single, tightly collaborative team. The name Metamorphic reflects our belief that the next advances in intelligence will come from a change in form, beyond scale—from artificial to natural intelligence.

About the Role

We are hiring Research Engineers to sit at the boundary of research and systems engineering. Our multimodal data spans trillions of tokens of video alongside rich neural and behavioral recordings, making this one of the most demanding dataloading challenges in frontier AI. You will own the systems that turn this large, heterogeneous data into training‑ready multimodal streams for foundation model training and evaluation at scale. This means designing and building a state‑of‑the‑art end‑to‑end dataloading stack: data formatting, preprocessing, filtering, sharding, caching, and streaming. You will build runtime interfaces that deliver data to distributed training jobs across GPU clusters with high throughput, reliability, and full observability. You'll have substantial autonomy to shape foundational technical decisions on a small, high‑impact team.

You’ll Thrive In This Role If You

• Are excited about working in a fast‑paced, production‑focused research lab that often requires switching between many hats
• Have significant software engineering experience and can move quickly without sacrificing rigor
• Are able to balance research goals with practical engineering constraints
• Enjoy pair programming and deeply collaborative work
• Are eager to learn more about machine learning research in a novel scientific domain
• Are enthusiastic to work at an organization that functions as a single, cohesive team pursuing large‑scale AI research
• Have ambitious goals for AI progress and are excited to create the best outcomes over the long term

We Offer

• The chance to work on one of the most scientifically consequential AI projects being pursued today
• A small, world‑class team where your contributions directly shape the science and the company
• Competitive compensation and benefits, along with visa sponsorship
• Strong mentorship and career development

Salary Range

$175,000 - $250,000 USD
Based on experience. We additionally offer a competitive equity package and comprehensive benefits, as well as visa sponsorship for international candidates.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computational Neuroscience, or a related field
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and familiarity with PyTorch
• Experience building high‑throughput data pipelines or dataloading systems for large‑scale distributed ML training
• Experience working with and building systems for complex, multimodal time‑series data
• Experience with video processing at scale: decoding, transcoding, I/O optimization for large video corpora
• Hands‑on experience profiling and benchmarking data systems on metrics such as throughput, IOPS, GPU utilization, and memory usage

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with multi‑modal transformer architectures
• Experience with distributed training environments and deep understanding of sharding models and data
• Experience with ML workflow orchestrators (e.g. Prefect, Dagster, Airflow)
• Experience with containerization, and scaling container orchestration (e.g. via Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience with performance‑critical compiled or systems languages (e.g. Rust, C++, CUDA)
• Proficiency with MLOps platforms for experiment tracking and reproducibility (e.g. MLflow, W&B)
• Background in scientific computing, computational neuroscience, life sciences, or ML‑adjacent research environments

Application Notes

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. If you don't see a role that fits, we encourage you to submit a general application and tell us how you'd like to contribute to our mission.