Research Engineer, Frontier Speculative Decoding

Togetherai; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Startup equity

Health insurance

Competitive benefits

Job summary

Togetherai is looking for a professional to bridge research with development in generative AI. Your role will focus on transforming general models into specialized tools, emphasizing data-centricity and model tuning.

This position requires a deep commitment to quality, where you'll work closely with customers and our research teams to ensure production-ready deployments. Togetherai offers competitive compensation in the range of $190,000 – $270,000 plus equity and benefits.

Qualifications

• Strong track record in hyperparameter optimization for model performance.
• Proficient in Python programming for developing and enhancing training codebases.
• Experience with managing jobs in high-performance computing environments.

Responsibilities

• Design speculator algorithms for accuracy and efficiency.
• Bridge raw data to production-ready models impacting customer success.
• Collaborate with experts to tackle high-performance challenges.

Skills

Hyperparameter tuning

Python

PyTorch

Data curation

Attention to detail

Experience with SLURM

Familiarity with Kubernetes

Knowledge of LLMs

Education

Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

SLURM

Job description

About the Role

Together AI is building the Inference Platform that powers the world's most advanced generative AI models. Your role will be a critical bridge between cutting‑edge research and real‑world applications, focusing on making translating our internal model training research to production‑ready deployment for our customers. This involves a deep commitment to data‑centric development, meticulous hyperparameter tuning, and rigorous checkpoint evaluation before models ever hit production.

This role will involve understanding customer specific needs and fine‑tuning models on our internal data recipe and their proprietary data. The goal is to transform general‑purpose models into highly performant, specialized tools that solve real business problems. You will not be training foundation models from scratch but rather focusing on creating highly efficient, specialized models by working with dedicated GPU clusters.

Responsibilities

• Design and iterate on novel speculator algorithms, combining architectural innovations with carefully curated data to push the frontier of accuracy–efficiency tradeoffs.
• Be the critical link between raw data and a production‑ready model, seeing your work directly impact our customers' success.
• Work in a fast‑paced, high‑impact role at the cutting edge of generative AI.
• Collaborate with a team of experts dedicated to solving real‑world, high‑performance challenges.
• You'll collaborate directly with customers to understand their needs, and work closely with our core inference and Applied ML research teams to integrate your work into the production platform.
• A culture of deep technical ownership where you are empowered to take on and solve challenging problems.

Requirements

• A genuine love for data curation and processing, with a meticulous attention to detail. You believe that great models start with great data.
• Demonstrated ability to perform effective hyperparameter searches and understand the trade‑offs involved in tuning models for specific tasks.
• Experience working with and building on top of existing training codebases. You are comfortable navigating complex code and contributing to its improvement.
• Strong attention‑to‑detail in evaluating model checkpoints to ensure they meet strict quality, performance, and reliability standards.
• Experience with Python and PyTorch.
• Familiarity with SLURM and/or Kubernetes clusters and experience submitting and managing jobs in a high‑performance computing environment.
• Familiarity with modern LLMs and generative models.
• Basic understanding of distributed training frameworks (e.g., FSDP, DeepSpeed).
• Bachelor’s, Master’s degree, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

About Together AI

Together AI is a research‑driven artificial intelligence company. We believe open and transparent AI systems will drive innovation and create the best outcomes for society, and together we are on a mission to significantly lower the cost of modern AI systems by co‑designing software, hardware, algorithms, and models. We have contributed to leading open‑source research, models, and datasets to advance the frontier of AI, and our team has been behind technological advancement such as FlashAttention, Hyena, FlexGen, ATLAS, and RedPajama. We invite you to join a passionate group of researchers and engineers in our journey in building the next generation AI infrastructure.

Compensation

We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance and other competitive benefits. The US base salary range for this full‑time position is: $190,000 – $270,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job‑related knowledge.

Equal Opportunity

Together AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and more.