Member of Technical Staff, Research (2026 PhD New Grad) — Fireworks AI

Fireworks AI, a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion and founded by the team behind PyTorch, is hiring a Member of Technical Staff, Research for 2026 PhD new graduates, offering a salary of $200k–300k/yr. The role, based in San Mateo, focuses on foundational research to advance LLMs and multimodal systems, with candidates expected to have completed or be completing their PhD by December 2026.

Member of Technical Staff, Research 2026 PhD New Grad - Salary - $200k–300k/yr - Location - San Mateo - Work type - On-site - Level - Staff - Posted - today - Verified live - today Apply on company site opens in new tab https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fireworks/82b41f4a-a945-4aee-a1fd-1ef9ab513e58/application Filed under RAG / Retrieval /rag-engineer-jobs/ Inference / Serving /inference-engineer-jobs/ Core ML /machine-learning-engineer-jobs/ This range sits 5% above the $238k median for Core ML roles in the United States on this board /machine-learning-engineer-jobs/ that publish pay 500 of 642 . About Us: Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI. THE ROLE: This role is designed for researchers finishing their PhD who want their work to reach production, not just publication. As a Member of Technical Staff on the Research team, you'll push the boundaries of generative AI, advancing LLMs and multimodal systems through foundational research. Your work will enhance model efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, directly shaping our high-performance AI infrastructure. You'll be paired with a senior researcher as a mentor and given a real research problem from day one. You'll collaborate with top experts in deep learning, distributed systems, and optimization, and you'll see the models you help create deployed by some of the world's leading companies — often within weeks rather than years. We welcome candidates who have completed within the last 6 months, or expected completion by December 2026. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Conduct foundational research to advance the capabilities, efficiency, and reliability of LLMs and multimodal systems - Design, implement, and evaluate novel model architectures, training methods, and optimization techniques - Work alongside engineering teams to transition research prototypes into production-grade systems - Analyze empirical results, identify performance bottlenecks, and iterate quickly to improve model quality - Bring ideas and emerging directions from your doctoral research into our internal research agenda MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: - PhD completed within the last 6 months, or expected completion by December 2026, in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computational Physics, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a similar field - Research background in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Physics, or a related area, demonstrated through your dissertation, publications, or research projects - Experience solving analytical problems using analytic and quantitative approaches - Experience communicating research to audiences with different backgrounds - Proficiency coding in Python, C/C++, or other similar languages - Hands-on experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: - First-authored publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, MLSys, or similar - Industry research internships, or open-source contributions to ML systems, model training, or inference projects - Research or engineering experience demonstrated via grants, fellowships, patents, or coding competitions - Experience with large-scale model training, distributed systems, GPU kernel development, or inference optimization - Experience taking research code beyond the prototype stage Why Fireworks? - Solve Hard Problems: Tackle challenges at the forefront of AI infrastructure, from low-latency inference to scalable model serving. - Build What’s Next: Work with bleeding-edge technology that impacts how businesses and developers harness AI globally. - Ownership & Impact: Join a fast-growing, passionate team where your work directly shapes the future of AI—no bureaucracy, just results. - Learn from the Best: Collaborate with world-class engineers and AI researchers who thrive on curiosity and innovation. Fireworks AI is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all innovators.