Skip to content

Research Engineer, Infrastructure, Numerics

Designs and optimizes distributed training infrastructure for large-scale LLMs, focusing on low-precision numerics, kernel optimizations, and communication frameworks to enable stable, scalable trillion-parameter model training. Requires strong systems engineering, deep learning frameworks knowledge, and collaborative research mindset.

About the job

What You’ll Do

  • Design and optimize distributed training infrastructure for large-scale LLMs, focusing on performance, stability, and reproducibility across multi-GPU and multi-node setups.
  • Implement and evaluate low-precision numerics (for example, BF16, MXFP8, NVFP4) to improve efficiency without sacrificing model quality.
  • Develop kernels and communication primitives that use hardware-level support for mixed and low-precision arithmetic.
  • Collaborate with research teams to co-design model architectures and training recipes that align with emerging numeric formats and stability constraints.
  • Prototype and benchmark scaling strategies such as data, tensor, and pipeline parallelism that integrate precision-adaptive computation and quantized communication.
  • Contribute to the design of our internal orchestration and monitoring systems to ensure that thousands of distributed experiments can run efficiently and reproducibly.
  • Publish and share learnings through internal documentation, open-source libraries, or technical reports that advance the field of scalable AI infrastructure.

Skills and Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in computer science, electrical engineering, statistics, machine learning, physics, robotics, or similar.
  • Understanding of deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX) and their underlying system architectures.
  • Thrive in a highly collaborative environment involving many, different cross-functional partners and subject matter experts.
  • A bias for action with a mindset to take initiative to work across different stacks and different teams where you spot the opportunity to make sure something ships.
  • Strong engineering skills, ability to contribute performant, maintainable code and debug in complex codebases in areas such as floating-point numerics, low-precision arithmetic, and distributed systems.

Preferred qualifications:

  • Familiarity with distributed frameworks such as PyTorch/XLA, DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM.
  • Experience implementing FP8, INT8, or block-floating point (MX) formats and understanding their numerical trade-offs.
  • Prior contributions to open-source deep learning infrastructure such as PyTorch, DeepSpeed, or XLA.
  • Publications, patents, or projects related to numerical optimization, communication-efficient training, or systems for large models.
  • Experience training and supporting large-scale AI models.
  • Track record of improving research productivity through infrastructure design or process improvements.

Logistics

Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $350,000 - $475,000 USD.

Benefits: Generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.

Skills

PyTorch, JAX, Deepspeed, Megatron-Lm, Pytorch/Xla, Xla, Bf16, Fp8, Int8, Distributed Systems

Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines Lab

San Francisco, CA

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
$350k+/yrOn-siteDevOps / SRE

Site Reliability Engineer drives end-to-end reliability for AI fine-tuning platform Tinker, including SLOs, monitoring, incident response, and multi-tenant GPU scheduling. Requires distributed systems experience, software proficiency for reliability, and production incident handling.

Anthropic

Anthropic

San Francisco, CA

DevOps / AgentOps Engineer, GTM Systems
$320k+/yrHybridDevOps / SRE

Build and operate an AI-first CI/CD and agent-operations platform for Salesforce and custom GTM applications. The role focuses on governed releases, approval workflows, observability, rollback, sandboxing, and SOX-compliant auditability.

Anthropic

Anthropic

San Francisco, CA
Software Engineer, Infrastructure, Interpretability
$320k+/yrHybridDevOps / SRE

Build secure, scalable infrastructure, data systems, compute tooling, and developer experiences for Anthropic’s Interpretability research team. The role partners closely with researchers, security, and platform teams and requires strong programming and infrastructure experience.

OpenAI

OpenAI

San Francisco, CA

Systems Integration Engineer, Build Systems | Consumer Devices
$293k+/yrHybrid5+ YOEDevOps / SRE

Build and operate scalable build systems, CI pipelines, and developer infrastructure for consumer-device software. The role requires 5+ years of engineering experience, expertise with Bazel or comparable build systems, and experience improving CI reliability and performance at scale.

OpenAI

OpenAI

San Francisco, CA

Network Engineer
$293k+/yrHybridDevOps / SRE

Designs, operates, and improves secure enterprise networks spanning offices, campuses, cloud environments, and connectivity services. The role combines architecture, production operations, troubleshooting, observability, security, and infrastructure automation.