Research Engineer, Open-Frontier AI Platform

Prime Intellect AI; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 150,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Cash compensation: $150k–$350k

Remote or SF office

Visa sponsorship

Relocation assistance

Quarterly off-sites

Learning opportunities

Job summary

Prime Intellect AI is building an open frontier AI platform and open models. You will take models from architecture experiments through full pretraining runs, scaling toward 1-3T parameters across the model and training stack.

You will work with data and evaluation researchers to improve training throughput and reliability. We seek someone who can design robust ablations, debug distributed training, and ensure experiments are reproducible while advancing frontier research for open models and

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience training language models, including modifying training code and following the effects through actual runs.
• Strong Python skills and experience with PyTorch or a comparable framework, with enough systems understanding to debug distributed training.
• A practical understanding of model architectures and optimization, including their effect on convergence.
• Ability to design an ablation that answers a research question and explain what its results do and don't show.
• Good judgment about what to investigate yourself and when to bring in a colleague.

Responsibilities

• Build and extend the pretraining code in prime-rl, taking small experiments into full training runs.
• Evaluate model architecture changes, including MoE and attention designs, against model quality and training cost.
• Profile training jobs and improve end-to-end throughput, working with systems engineers on hardware-aware execution.
• Make long runs resilient to failures, with reliable checkpointing and recovery.
• Investigate training dynamics and numerical stability, checking that optimizations preserve convergence.
• Run controlled ablations to guide larger experiments, keeping the setup and results reproducible.
• Work with data and evaluation researchers on training mixtures, including midtraining and long-context experiments.

Skills

LM training

Python

PyTorch

Distributed training

Research design

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

Prime Intellect AI is building an open frontier AI platform and open models. You will take models from architecture experiments through full pretraining runs, scaling toward 1-3T parameters across the model and training stack.

You will work with data and evaluation researchers to improve training throughput and reliability. We seek someone who can design robust ablations, debug distributed training, and ensure experiments are reproducible while advancing frontier research for open models and