Research Engineer [ Distributed Training ]

Metamorphic; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Competitive compensation

Equity package

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Metamorphic is hiring Research Engineers to build and scale distributed systems that enable training state-of-the-art foundation models across thousands of GPUs. You will design and optimize our distributed training framework, implement advanced parallelism strategies, and provide the tooling researchers need to run large-scale experiments quickly and reproducibly.

You will have substantial autonomy to shape foundational technical decisions on a small, high-impact team, with visa sponsorship and

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field.
• Strong software engineering skills with a proven track record of building complex systems.
• Hands-on experience building and debugging distributed training infrastructure (PyTorch FSDP, DeepSpeed ZeRO, Megatron, TorchTitan, or similar) and optimizing advanced parallelism strategies.
• Strong understanding of GPU architecture and performance: memory hierarchy, tensor core utilization, bandwidth vs compute limitations.
• Strong understanding of the NVIDIA ecosystem: CUDA, NCCL, NVLink/NVSwitch topologies, mixed-precision training (MXFP8/NVFP4), and profiling tools.
• Deep familiarity with PyTorch internals, including torch.distributed, autograd, memory management, and torch.compile.
• Experience with cloud/HPC environments and job orchestration across hundreds of GPUs.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimize distributed training framework for foundation models.
• Implement advanced parallelism strategies and fault-tolerant infrastructure.
• Provide tooling researchers need to run large-scale experiments quickly and reproducibly.

Skills

Software engineering

Distributed systems

PyTorch internals

CUDA/NVidia

GPU optimization

Deep learning research

Pair programming

Cloud HPC

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/ML

Tools

PyTorch FSDP

DeepSpeed ZeRO

Megatron

TorchTitan

NVIDIA CUDA

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 join our growing AI research team. You will work on building and scaling the distributed systems that enable training Metamorphic’s state-of-the-art foundation models across thousands of GPUs. This is a high-impact, technically deep role working at the frontier of ML research and engineering. You will design and optimize our distributed training framework, implement advanced parallelism strategies, build fault-tolerant infrastructure, and provide the tooling researchers need to run large-scale experiments quickly and reproducibly. You'll have substantial autonomy to shape foundational technical decisions on a small, high-impact team.

You’ll Thrive In This Role If You

• Have significant software engineering experience and can move quickly without sacrificing rigor
• Are able to balance research goals with practical engineering constraints
• Are happy to take on tasks outside your job description to support the team
• 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

$200,000 - $280,000 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, or a related field
• Strong software engineering skills with a proven track record of building complex systems
• Hands‑on experience building and debugging distributed training infrastructure (PyTorch FSDP, DeepSpeed ZeRO, Megatron, TorchTitan, or similar) and optimizing advanced parallelism strategies
• Strong understanding of GPU architecture and performance: memory hierarchy, tensor core utilization, bandwidth vs compute limitations
• Strong understanding of the NVIDIA ecosystem: CUDA, NCCL, NVLink/NVSwitch topologies, mixed‑precision training (MXFP8/NVFP4), and profiling tools
• Deep familiarity with PyTorch internals, including torch.distributed, autograd, memory management, and torch.compile
• Experience with cloud/HPC environments and job orchestration across hundreds of GPUs

Nice to Have

• Experience building fault‑tolerant training pipelines, including checkpointing, automatic recovery, and infrastructure for reproducible experimentation
• Experience with the latest in mixture-of-experts architectures, diffusion model training, or multimodal models
• Experience with inference serving frameworks (vLLM, TensorRT‑LLM) or building custom inference solutions

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.