ML Infra Engineer, Modeling

Physical Intelligence

$150K — $180K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience in ML training infrastructure.
  • Hands-on experience with JAX (preferred) or PyTorch for large-scale training.
  • Familiarity with distributed training and multi-host setups.
  • Experience managing workloads on cloud platforms like SLURM or Kubernetes.
  • Ability to debug and optimize performance bottlenecks across the training stack.
  • Strong cross-functional communication and ownership mindset.

Responsibilities

  • Own the training/inference infrastructure by designing and maintaining large-scale model training systems.
  • Scale distributed training by working with researchers to use JAX on TPU and GPU clusters.
  • Optimize performance by profiling memory usage, device utilization, and distributed synchronization.
  • Enable rapid iteration by building tools for launching, monitoring, and debugging experiments.
  • Translate research needs into infrastructure capabilities while guiding best practices.
  • Contribute to core training code for evolving JAX models and supporting new architectures.

Benefits

  • Collaborative environment with cross-functional teams.
  • Opportunities to work on cutting-edge technologies and large-scale systems.
  • Emphasis on continuous learning and innovation in ML infrastructure.
  • Hands-on role with significant ownership over critical training systems.
Full Job Description
In this role you will help scale and optimize our training systems and core model code. You'll own critical infrastructure for large-scale training, from managing GPU/TPU compute and job orchestration to building reusable and efficient JAX training pipelines. You'll work closely with researchers and model engineers to translate ideas into experiments-and those experiments into production training runs.

This is a hands-on, high-leverage role at the intersection of ML, software engineering, and scalable infrastructure.

The Team

The ML Infrastructure team supports and accelerates PI's core modeling efforts by building the systems that make large-scale training reliable, reproducible, and fast. The team works closely with research, data, and platform engineers to ensure models can scale from prototype to production-grade training runs.

In This Role You Will
  • Own training/inference infrastructure: Design, implement, and maintain systems for large-scale model training, including scheduling, job management, checkpointing, and metrics/logging.
  • Scale distributed training: Work with researchers to scale JAX-based training across TPU and GPU clusters with minimal friction.
  • Optimize performance: Profile and improve memory usage, device utilization, throughput, and distributed synchronization.
  • Enable rapid iteration: Build abstractions for launching, monitoring, debugging, and reproducing experiments.
  • Partner with researchers: Translate research needs into infra capabilities and guide best practices for training at scale.
  • Contribute to core training code: Evolve JAX model and training code to support new architectures, modalities, and evaluation metrics.

What We Hope You'll Bring
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building ML training infrastructure or internal platforms.
  • Hands-on large-scale training experience in JAX (preferred), PyTorch.
  • Familiarity with distributed training, multi-host setups, data loaders, and evaluation pipelines.
  • Experience managing training workloads on cloud platforms (e.g., SLURM, Kubernetes, GCP TPU/GKE, AWS).
  • Ability to debug and optimize performance bottlenecks across the training stack.
  • Strong cross-functional communication and ownership mindset.

Bonus Points If You Have
  • Deep ML systems background (e.g., training compilers, runtime optimization, custom kernels).
  • Experience operating close to hardware (GPU/TPU performance tuning).
  • Background in robotics, multimodal models, or large-scale foundation models.
  • Experience designing abstractions that balance researcher flexibility with system reliability.

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