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Periodic Labs

Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Midtraining

  • Office

Salary

$250,000 - 350,000/ year

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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.

Responsibilities

  • 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.
  • 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

Conditions

Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this process.

Where you’d work

From the office

Visa sponsored

About the company

Periodic Labs

  • Industry: AI

Office in Menlo Park, United States

Also hiring in Montreal, Canada

Your chances

Worth a look before you spend an evening tailoring a CV for it.

  • 22 checks run
  • 2 red flags

Still hiring?

14 checks

No red flags

How crowded?

8 checks

2 red flags

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  • Must-haves
Details12 facts · Role, Location, Compensation, Employment, Company
Tech stack
  • LLMs
Type
Full-time
Equity
Equity offered
Industry
AI
Specialty
ML
Region
United States
Show 6 more factsShow less

Role

Category
Data & Analytics
Specialty
ML
Tech stack
  • LLMs

Location

Work model
Office
Region
United States
Office
  • Menlo Park, United States
Visa sponsorship
Sponsored

Compensation

Salary
$250,000 - 350,000 / year
Pay period
Annual
Equity
Equity offered

Employment

Type
Full-time

Company

Industry
AI

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