{"slug": "research-engineer-midtraining-periodic-labs", "title": "Research Engineer - Midtraining — Periodic Labs", "summary": "Periodic Labs, an AI and physical sciences company, is hiring a Research Engineer - Midtraining in Menlo Park, CA, offering $250k–350k/yr plus equity, to improve scientific reasoning in frontier models by curating data, building evals, and running large-scale training experiments.", "body_md": "# Research Engineer - Midtraining\n\n- Salary\n- $250k–350k/yr\n- Location\n- Menlo Park, CA\n- Work type\n- On-site\n- Posted\n- today\n\n[\nApply on company site (opens in new tab) ](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/periodic-labs/d3be5ecc-c4d3-4c9e-9a4d-519ab6147474/application)\n\nWe'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.\n\nAbout the Role\n\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.\n\nWhat You'll Do\n\n- Identify, process, and curate novel sources of scientific data for large-scale model training.\n- Generate high-quality synthetic data to fill gaps in scientific knowledge and reasoning.\n- Build evaluations that correlate with downstream scientific task performance, working closely with RL researchers, physicists, and chemists.\n- Develop and apply techniques such as self-distillation and on-policy distillation to improve model capability.\n- Design and run large-scale training experiments, partnering with supercompute engineers to scale efficiently across thousands of GPUs.\n- Build tools for yourself and the team to investigate how data choices shape model intelligence.\n\nYou Will Thrive in This Role If You Have\n\n- Experience training LLMs on curated mixes of trillions of tokens.\n- Experience with mid-training or pre-training at scale — big-lab experience is a strong plus.\n- Experience on a dedicated evals team supporting a large production training run.\n- Hands-on use of self-distillation, on-policy distillation, or similar methods in a real training pipeline.\n- The ability to calculate scaling laws and compute-optimal hyperparameters.\n- Comfort working across data, evals, and training infrastructure.\n\nEspecially Strong Candidates May Also Have\n\n- Experience optimizing throughput and reliability for large-scale distributed training runs.\n- A background in AI for science or training on specialized domain data (e.g., protein, materials, or other scientific datasets).\n- Experience on a big training run tracking evals and driving interventions while the run was live, not just as a peripheral contributor.\n\nMechanics\n\n- Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or similar experience\n- Location: Menlo Park, CA (Soon: San Francisco, too)\n- Compensation: $250,000–$350,000 + equity\n- Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this process.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/research-engineer-midtraining-periodic-labs", "canonical_source": "https://frontierroles.com/jobs/periodic-labs-research-engineer-midtraining-70df71/", "published_at": "2026-08-11 21:57:06+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-12 02:46:40.620960+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "large-language-models", "ai-research", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Periodic Labs"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/research-engineer-midtraining-periodic-labs", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/research-engineer-midtraining-periodic-labs.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/research-engineer-midtraining-periodic-labs.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/research-engineer-midtraining-periodic-labs.jsonld"}}