Research Engineer - Pre-training

The role

You will take open models from architecture experiments through full pre-training runs scaling toward 1–3T parameters. You will work across the model and training stack to make research decisions and fix systems problems.

What you will do

• Build and extend the pre-training 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.

Required 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.

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 platform Lab unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system.