Staff Researcher - Post-Training LLMs & Production

Mixpeek; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Diversity of problem spaces

Job summary

Modal is building a comprehensive platform for the full lifecycle of LLMs, from training to deployment and monitoring, and is seeking researchers with a post-training focus. You’ll work closely with the research lead to identify high-impact bets, own end-to-end investigations, and explore how the research translates into practical production capabilities.

You will collaborate with customers and Forward Deployed Engineers, push frontier ideas into products, and contribute to a broader research

Qualifications

• A research-leaning background in post-training LLMs, with work you can point to.
• Enough product sense to tell which frontier techniques matter to users and which stay academic.
• A record of shipping research that others can build on, whether in a lab or in industry.
• The drive to take a research bet from idea to result without much hand-holding, working in the open with the rest of the team.
• Ability to work in-person, in our NYC or San Francisco office.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end post-training research bets: async and agentic RL, on-policy distillation, long-context RL, small routing models, and whatever else the research agenda calls for.
• Work directly with customers alongside our Forward Deployed Engineers to train models and bring what you learn back into the research.
• Carry and expand collaborations with outside research labs. For example, our work with ZLab on DFlash, a speculator design built on KV injection and blockwise parallel drafting.
• Work with engineering to turn frontier post-training techniques into products: an opinionated post-training framework, distributed-training approaches (DiLoCo, evolutionary strategies), online training for deployed models, and more.
• Help shape the research agenda. None of the above is prescriptive; your work will help guide our future.

Skills

Post-training LLM research

Product sense

Shipping research

Independent work

In-person collaboration

Job description

Modal is building a comprehensive platform for the full lifecycle of LLMs, from training to deployment and monitoring, and is seeking researchers with a post-training focus. You’ll work closely with the research lead to identify high-impact bets, own end-to-end investigations, and explore how the research translates into practical production capabilities.

You will collaborate with customers and Forward Deployed Engineers, push frontier ideas into products, and contribute to a broader research