Periodic Labs

Research Engineer - Midtraining

Periodic Labs · Menlo Park, CA
Menlo Park, CA $250K–$350K Posted 2026-08-11
Salary
$250K–$350K
Type
Full-time
Experience
7+ yr

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.
$110K — 10th pctl $265K — 90th pctl
This role’s midpoint $300K vs. market median $180K for Engineering roles
+65%
above median
Based on 22,000+ Engineering roles with disclosed salary ranges tracked on NewJob.
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