# Pre-training Research Engineer

- Company: [Sciforium](<https://jobstar.asia/company/sciforium>)
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Team: Engineering
- Employment type: Full Time
- Salary: $165K – $225K
- Posted: August 31, 2026

## Job description

Sciforium is an AI infrastructure company developing next-generation multimodal AI models and a proprietary, high-efficiency serving platform. Backed by multi-million-dollar funding and direct sponsorship from AMD with hands-on support from AMD engineers the team is scaling rapidly to build the full stack powering frontier AI models and real-time applications.

## **About the role**

As a Pre-training Research Engineer, you’ll focus on model implementation, pertaining and scaling, and improving the quality of our byte-native and multimodal foundation models. You’ll build and iterate quickly on research ideas, contribute production-grade training code and infrastructure, and help deliver high-quality base models that can serve real-world use cases at scale.

## **Key Responsibilities**

### **Pre-training & Scaling**

* Train large byte-native and multimodal foundation models across massive, heterogeneous corpora.
* Implement and evaluate new model architectures, training objectives, and optimization methods.
* Develop stable pre-training recipes and run scaling experiments for novel architectures.
* Conduct ablations and analyze training dynamics, model behavior, and base-model quality.
* Work with data and distributed training engineers to improve training efficiency, reliability, and scalability.

## **Must-Haves**

* **5+ years of experience** in machine learning research or engineering, with a proven track record of developing and pre-training large language or multimodal foundation models.
* **Software Engineering:** Strong general software engineering skills, with the ability to write robust and performant training code.
* **ML Foundations:** Solid understanding of deep learning fundamentals and modern pre-training methods and literature.
* **Research and Experimentation:** Ability to quickly implement research ideas and evaluate them using clear baselines, ablations, metrics, and analysis.
* **GPU and Distributed Training:** Hands-on experience running training workloads in GPU-based environments, with familiarity with distributed training.
* **Education:** MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, or a related field.

## **Nice-to-Haves**

* **PhD** in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, or a related field.
* **JAX Ecosystem:** Extensive experience with the JAX, Flax, and XLA stack.
* **Large-Scale Distributed Training:** Experience with multi-node pre-training using systems such as FSDP, ZeRO, or Megatron.
* **Training Recipes and Scaling:** Experience developing training recipes, ablations, or scaling experiments.
* **Monitoring and Reproducibility:** Experience owning end-to-end training and evaluation pipelines with monitoring and reproducibility.

### **Education**

* MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, or a related field.

## **Benefits include**

* Medical, dental, and vision insurance
* 401k plan
* Daily lunch, snacks, and beverages
* Flexible time off
* Competitive salary and equity

## **Equal opportunity**

Sciforium is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.

## Apply

[Apply on Sciforium](<https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sciforium/90901079-84d8-46fd-90a4-f52e1bd6943c>)

Canonical job page: <https://jobstar.asia/job/pre-training-research-engineer-sciforium-san-francisco-759312af76cef74f>
