{"id":1568206,"url":"https://alion.io/job/periodic-labs-research-scientistresearch-engineer-midtraining","title":"Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Midtraining","company":{"id":685855,"name":"Periodic Labs","domain":"periodic.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/periodic","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":16,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-25T05:49:26Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Menlo Park, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":250000,"max":350000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":350000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Pre-training","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-30T19:04:44Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-30","last_verified_at":"2026-10-25T13:00:37Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":24,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":24},"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.\nAbout the Role\nWe'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.\nWhat You'll Do\nIdentify, process, and curate novel sources of scientific data for large-scale model training.\n\nGenerate high-quality synthetic data to fill gaps in scientific knowledge and reasoning.\n\nBuild evaluations that correlate with downstream scientific task performance, working closely with RL researchers, physicists, and chemists.\n\nDevelop and apply techniques such as self-distillation and on-policy distillation to improve model capability.\n\nDesign and run large-scale training experiments, partnering with supercompute engineers to scale efficiently across thousands of GPUs.\n\nBuild tools for yourself and the team to investigate how data choices shape model intelligence.\n\nYou Will Thrive in This Role If You Have\nExperience training LLMs on curated mixes of trillions of tokens.\n\nExperience on a dedicated evals team supporting a large production training run.\n\nHands-on use of self-distillation, on-policy distillation, or similar methods in a real training pipeline.\n\nExperience with scaling laws and compute-optimal hyperparameters.\n\nComfort working across data, evals, and training infrastructure.\n\nEspecially Strong Candidates May Also Have\nExperience optimizing throughput and reliability for large-scale distributed training runs.\n\nA background in AI for science or training on specialized domain data (e.g., protein, materials, or other scientific datasets).\n\nExperience creating evals or synthetic data for non verifiable tasks and tracking performance over live runs.\n\nMechanics\nMinimum education: Bachelor's degree or similar experience\n\nLocation: Menlo Park, CA\n\nCompensation: $250,000-$350,000 + equity\n\nVisa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this 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