Research Engineer - RL Infrastructure

The role

You will build and optimize systems infrastructure for large-scale RL and distributed training workloads. This involves improving training efficiency and designing low-level performance optimizations for the prime-rl framework.

What you will do

• Build and optimize the systems infrastructure behind large-scale RL and distributed training workloads by contributing to our prime-rl framework.
• Improve end-to-end training efficiency across compute, memory, networking, and scheduling layers.
• Design and implement low-level performance optimizations, including kernels, communication paths, and runtime improvements.
• Work on distributed training systems spanning data, tensor, and pipeline parallel workloads.
• Help shape the architecture of our RL training stack, including async rollout and post-training systems.
• Contribute to open-source libraries and internal infrastructure used for frontier-scale model training.
• Collaborate closely with researchers and infrastructure engineers to translate bottlenecks into concrete systems improvements.
• Stay at the frontier of training systems, inference systems, compiler/runtime tooling, and hardware-aware optimization techniques.

Required qualifications

• Strong systems engineering experience in AI/ML infrastructure, especially around large-scale model training or inference.
• Deep familiarity with PyTorch and distributed training frameworks such as PyTorch Distributed, DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron, vLLM, Ray, or related tooling.
• Experience optimizing training performance across kernels, memory movement, communication overhead, or parallelization strategy.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale training techniques including data parallelism, tensor parallelism, and pipeline parallelism.
• Strong understanding of GPU architecture, profiling, and performance debugging.
• Ability to identify bottlenecks across the stack and drive improvements from first principles.
• Comfort working in a fast-moving environment with ambiguous problems and high ownership.

Nice to have

• Experience writing or optimizing CUDA / Triton kernels.
• Experience with compiler or runtime optimization for ML systems.
• Experience working on RL training infrastructure, rollout systems, or asynchronous training pipelines.
• Experience with multi-node GPU clusters and high-performance networking.
• Contributions to open-source ML systems or infrastructure projects.
• Interest in publishing technical work or sharing insights through engineering blogs and technical writing.

Benefits

• Cash Compensation Range of $150-350k, including equity incentives
• Flexible work arrangements, with the option to work remotely or in-person at our offices in San Francisco.
• Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance for international candidates.
• Quarterly team off-sites, hackathons, conferences and learning opportunities.
• Opportunity to work with a talented, hard-working and mission-driven team

Before you apply

• Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance offered for international candidates

About the company

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack. The company trains open frontier models and ships the same stack to its customers.