Research Engineer - Distributed Training

Prime Intellect

$150K — $350K *
US-AnywhereRemote in San Francisco, CA
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Strong systems engineering experience in AI/ML infrastructure for large-scale training or inference.
  • Familiarity with PyTorch and distributed training frameworks like PyTorch Distributed, DeepSpeed, and others.
  • Experience in optimizing training performance across various strategies.
  • Hands-on with large-scale training techniques including data, tensor, and pipeline parallelism.
  • Understanding of GPU architecture and performance debugging.
  • Ability to identify bottlenecks and drive improvements from first principles.
  • Comfortable in a fast-paced environment with ambiguous challenges.

Responsibilities

  • Build and optimize distributed training infrastructure for pre-training and large-scale RL workloads.
  • Improve training efficiency across compute, memory, networking, and scheduling.
  • Design and implement low-level performance optimizations such as kernels and runtime improvements.
  • Work on distributed systems for data, tensor, and pipeline parallel workloads.
  • Shape the architecture of the RL training stack with async and post-training systems.
  • Contribute to open-source libraries and internal infrastructure for model training.
  • Collaborate with researchers and engineers to identify and resolve system bottlenecks.

Benefits

  • Flexible work arrangements, with remote or in-office options.
  • Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance for international candidates.
  • Quarterly team off-sites, hackathons, and learning opportunities.
  • Work with a passionate team aiming to leverage technology for science and AI advancement.
Full Job Description
What You'll Work On
  • Build and optimize the distributed training infrastructure behind our pre-training and large-scale RL 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.

You May Be a Fit If You Have
  • 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.


Especially Exciting
  • 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 & Perks
  • Cash Compensation Range of $150-350k, plus equity incentives, aligning your success with the growth and impact of Prime Intellect.
  • 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, united by a shared passion for leveraging technology to accelerate science and AI.

If you're excited about building the systems foundation for frontier-scale training and open superintelligence, we'd love to hear from you.

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