Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Pre-training

About the team

We are seeking passionate Research Scientists and Engineers to join our growing Pre-training team in Zurich. We are involved in developing the next generation of large language models. The team primarily focuses on multimodal capabilities: giving LLMs the ability to understand and interact with modalities other than text.

In this role, you will work at the intersection of cutting-edge research and practical engineering, contributing to the development of safe, steerable, and trustworthy AI systems.

Responsibilities

In this role you will interact with many parts of the engineering and research stacks.

• Conduct research and implement solutions in areas such as model architecture, algorithms, data processing, and optimizer development

• Independently lead small research projects while collaborating with team members on larger initiatives

• Design, run, and analyze scientific experiments to advance our understanding of large language models

• Optimize and scale our training infrastructure to improve efficiency and reliability

• Develop and improve dev tooling to enhance team productivity

• Contribute to the entire stack, from low-level optimizations to high-level model design

Qualifications & Experience

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single criterion. Because we focus on so many areas, the team is looking for both experienced engineers and strong researchers, and encourage anyone along the researcher/engineer spectrum to apply.

• Degree (BA required, MS or PhD preferred) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field

• Strong software engineering skills with a proven track record of building complex systems

• Expertise in Python and deep learning frameworks

• Have worked on high-performance, large-scale ML systems, particularly in the context of language modeling

• Familiarity with ML Accelerators, Kubernetes, and large-scale data processing

• Strong problem-solving skills and a results-oriented mindset

• Excellent communication skills and ability to work in a collaborative environment

You'll thrive in this role if you

• Have significant software engineering experience

• Are able to balance research goals with practical engineering constraints

• Are happy to take on tasks outside your job description to support the team

• Enjoy pair programming and collaborative work

• Are eager to learn more about machine learning research

• Are enthusiastic to work at an organization that functions as a single, cohesive team pursuing large-scale AI research projects

• Have ambitious goals for AI safety and general progress in the next few years, and you’re excited to create the best outcomes over the long-term

Sample Projects

• Optimizing the throughput of novel attention mechanisms

• Proposing Transformer variants, and experimentally comparing their performance

• Preparing large-scale datasets for model consumption

• Scaling distributed training…