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Research Engineer - Midtraining

Job in Menlo Park, San Mateo County, California, 94029, USA
Listing for: Periodic Labs
Full Time position
Listed on 2026-09-25
Job specializations:
  • Research/Development
    AI Evaluation, AI Business & Operations, Data Scientist
Salary/Wage Range or Industry Benchmark: 250000 - 350000 USD Yearly USD 250000.00 350000.00 YEAR
Job Description & How to Apply Below

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 Mid training 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 (Soon: San Francisco, too)
  • 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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