Before you apply
Listed location: Menlo Park, CA
Work arrangement: onsite. A remote label does not confirm worldwide eligibility or visa sponsorship.
Read the employer’s description for qualifications, compensation and work eligibility. Confirm the position is still open on the application page.
Job description supplied by Periodic Labs; category and skill labels may be inferred. How our listings work · Report a problem
Job Description
We're an AI and physical sciences company building state-of-the-art models to accelerate breakthroughs across materials, energy, and beyond. Backed by world-class investors and growing rapidly, we operate at the pace the frontier requires. Our team brings deep expertise, genuine ownership, and a drive to push the boundaries of what's scientifically possible.
About the Role
We're training frontier models to develop deep scientific knowledge and reasoning for scientific discovery. As a Midtraining Research Engineer, you'll take base models and improve their scientific reasoning: curating and generating data, building evals, and running large-scale training experiments. Your work will also lay the groundwork for our pre-training efforts down the line.
What You'll Do
Identify, process, and curate novel sources of scientific data for large-scale model training.
Generate high-quality synthetic data to fill gaps in scientific knowledge and reasoning.
Build evaluations that correlate with downstream scientific task performance, working closely with RL researchers, physicists, and chemists.
Develop and apply techniques such as self-distillation and on-policy distillation to improve model capability.
Design and run large-scale training experiments, partnering with supercompute engineers to scale efficiently across thousands of GPUs.
Build tools for yourself and the team to investigate how data choices shape model intelligence.
You Will Thrive in This Role If You Have
Experience training LLMs on curated mixes of trillions of tokens.
Experience on a dedicated evals team supporting a large production training run.
Hands-on use of self-distillation, on-policy distillation, or similar methods in a real training pipeline.
Experience with scaling laws and compute-optimal hyperparameters.
Comfort working across data, evals, and training infrastructure.
Especially Strong Candidates May Also Have
Experience optimizing throughput and reliability for large-scale distributed training runs.
A background in AI for science or training on specialized domain data (e.g., protein, materials, or other scientific datasets).
Experience creating evals or synthetic data for non verifiable tasks and tracking performance over live runs.
Mechanics
Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or similar experience
Location: Menlo Park, CA
Compensation: $250,000–$350,000 + equity
Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this process.
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Frequently asked questions
Is the Research Scientist/Engineer position at Periodic Labs remote?
The Research Scientist/Engineer role at Periodic Labs does not have a confirmed remote arrangement in our data. Check the employer description for its work location.
What type of employment is the Research Scientist/Engineer role?
Periodic Labs is hiring for a full-time Research Scientist/Engineer position.
How do I apply for the Research Scientist/Engineer position at Periodic Labs?
You can apply for the Research Scientist/Engineer role directly through Periodic Labs's official application link provided on this page.
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