Research Engineer - Frontier Models for Scientific Discovery

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

Job summary

Periodic Labs is seeking a Midtraining Research Engineer to advance scientific reasoning in frontier models. You will curate data, build evals, and run large-scale training experiments to improve base models and lay groundwork for pre-training efforts.

You will collaborate with RL researchers, physicists, and chemists, leveraging self-distillation methods and scaling strategies to push capabilities across thousands of GPUs.

Qualifications

• Experience training LLMs on large-scale data and runs.
• Experience on an evals team supporting production training.
• Hands-on use of self-distillation or on-policy distillation.
• Knowledge of scaling laws and compute-optimal hyperparameters.
• Comfort working across data, evals and training infra.

Responsibilities

• Identify, process, and curate novel data sources for large-scale model training.
• Generate high-quality synthetic data to fill gaps in knowledge and reasoning.
• Build evaluations that correlate with downstream task performance.
• Develop distillation techniques to improve model capability.
• Design and run large-scale training experiments with thousands of GPUs.
• Build tools to study how data choices affect model intelligence.

Skills

Experience training LLMs

Evals team experience

Self-distillation / on-policy distill

Scaling laws & hyperparameters

Data/evals/training infra coordination

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Job description

Periodic Labs is seeking a Midtraining Research Engineer to advance scientific reasoning in frontier models. You will curate data, build evals, and run large-scale training experiments to improve base models and lay groundwork for pre-training efforts.

You will collaborate with RL researchers, physicists, and chemists, leveraging self-distillation methods and scaling strategies to push capabilities across thousands of GPUs.