Is the Research Engineer, Midtraining role remote?

No — this is an on-site role in Menlo Park, CA.

What's the salary range?

Periodic Labs lists $250,000–$350,000 for this role.

Where is the role based?

Periodic Labs is hiring for this position in Menlo Park, CA.

What's the tech stack?

Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AI/ML, large-scale training, on-policy distillation, self-distillation, synthetic data.

Does Periodic Labs sponsor work visas for this role?

Yes — the posting indicates visa sponsorship is available for the right candidate.

What seniority level is this role?

Periodic Labs targets mid-level candidates for this position.

Is this full-time or contract?

Full-time for this Research Engineer, Midtraining role at Periodic Labs.

Research Engineer, Midtraining at Periodic Labs

Joblaze summary

In the role of Midtraining Research Engineer at Periodic Labs, the individual will focus on enhancing scientific reasoning in AI models through data curation, synthetic data generation, and large-scale training experiments. Key skills include experience with large language models, self-distillation techniques, and a solid understanding of training infrastructure. This position is ideal for someone with a strong background in AI and science, particularly those who have worked on specialized datasets. The company is rapidly growing and emphasizes a collaborative environment that pushes the boundaries of scientific discovery.

Joblaze insights

Listed 9 days ago on Joblaze — tracked directly from Periodic Labs's career page.
Periodic Labs has 29 other open roles including Don't See Your Role? Apply Here!, Computational Scientist, Differentiable Physics, Environmental Health and Safety.
5148 active AI/ML roles on Joblaze right now.
5 active synthetic data roles on Joblaze right now.
Salary band is above the typical range for AI/ML roles (median ~$188,000).
Pays more than 80% of the 2236 salaried AI/ML roles we track (median $180,000). See AI/ML salary trends

Quick facts

Is the Research Engineer, Midtraining role remote?: No — this is an on-site role in Menlo Park, CA.
What's the salary range?: Periodic Labs lists $250,000–$350,000 for this role.
Where is the role based?: Periodic Labs is hiring for this position in Menlo Park, CA.
What's the tech stack?: Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AI/ML, large-scale training, on-policy distillation, self-distillation, synthetic data.
Does Periodic Labs sponsor work visas for this role?: Yes — the posting indicates visa sponsorship is available for the right candidate.
What seniority level is this role?: Periodic Labs targets mid-level candidates for this position.
Is this full-time or contract?: Full-time for this Research Engineer, Midtraining role at Periodic Labs.

From the original posting

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 (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.