{"id":40229,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sarvam-ai-ml-researcher-foundational-models","title":"ML Researcher, Foundational Models","company":{"id":229,"name":"Sarvam AI","domain":"sarvam.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/sarvam-ai","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":37,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":91,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Bengaluru, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":22000,"max_usd":55000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":32},"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Pre-training","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":true},{"name":"Mixture of Experts","optional":true},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":true},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":true},{"name":"RLHF","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-05-21T07:19:23Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-05-21","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T00:14:29Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":167,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":166},"description":"About Sarvam\nSarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India’s full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India’s leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC.\nAbout the Role\nYou'll work on the open-ended questions that decide what our next models look like. This is not a fine-tuning role. It's not an \"apply known recipes\" role. We're looking for a researcher who can take a vague hunch about architecture, optimization, data composition, or training dynamics, design the right ablations, run them at meaningful scale, and turn the result into a decision that ships in a production training run.\nYou will have direct access to large compute and a tight feedback loop with the engineers building our training stack and data pipelines. You will be expected to disagree with the team and defend your reasoning with evidence.\nWhat You’ll Do\nDrive open-ended research on architecture, optimization, scaling behaviour, training stability, and post-training recipes for our next generation of foundational models.\n\nDesign and execute ablations at scales that actually inform large-run decisions - including running pre-training experiments end-to-end yourself.\n\nTranslate research findings into concrete proposals for the next training run, and own those proposals through to production.\n\nWork shoulder-to-shoulder with the infrastructure and data teams; many of the most important research questions live at that boundary.\n\nRead broadly, write internally, and publish externally when the work merits it.\n\nWhat We’re Looking For\nPhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or a closely related field (or in the final stages of completion).\n\n3+ years of research experience post-PhD (or equivalent depth). Exceptional early-career candidates with a strong research record will be considered.\n\nFirst-author publications at top-tier ML venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, or COLM.\n\nHands-on experience pre-training transformer-based language models from scratch, ideally at 7B+ parameters. You should be able to describe a training run you owned end-to-end, including what went wrong and how you debugged it.\n\nMeaningful contributions to the open-source LLM ecosystem - research code, model releases, datasets, or substantive contributions to widely-used projects.\n\nFluency in PyTorch and comfort with distributed training. You should be able to read a training loop and immediately see where it might be slow, unstable, or wrong.\n\nStrong intuition for experimental design - knowing what to measure, what to ablate, and what scale a result needs to hold at before it can be trusted.\n\nBonus Points\nWork on novel architectures (mixture-of-experts, state-space models, hybrid architectures) or non-trivial modifications to standard transformers.\n\nExperience with multilingual or multimodal pre-training.\n\nResearch contributions in post-training (RLHF, RLVR, distillation, reasoning models).\n\nA track record of taking a research idea from prototype to a capability that shipped.\n\nWhy this role?\nYou will be one of a small number of people in the world who get to make architectural and training-recipe decisions on a frontier-scale model run, with the autonomy and compute to back it up.\nWhy Sarvam?\nSarvam is a fast-moving, high talent-density team building full-stack AI for India, working on problems that push the frontiers of AI with real population-scale impact.\nWork alongside researchers, engineers, builders, and business leaders who move fast and hold each other to a very high bar\n\nHigh ownership and high impact, from day one\n\nEverything we do is AI-first, from the way we build and ship to the way we think about problems\n\nYou can work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates\n\nIf you want to work on problems at the frontier of AI in India, Sarvam is the place to be.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4150,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["LLM & Generative AI","Natural Language Processing","Speech & Audio AI","Foundation 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