[Job Radar](https://jobradar.live/) / [Jobs](https://jobradar.live/ilanlar) / Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Midtraining

Active
On-site
Menlo Park, CA, California, United States
Posted · 30.09.2026
Ashby (US)

# Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Midtraining

Periodic Labs

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
• Compensation: $250,000–$350,000 + equity
• Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this process.

This job was verified from Ashby (US). Applications are completed on the original source.

[Apply on the original listing ↗](https://jobradar.live/ilan/91f30385-d5e6-4540-b879-a57bc2dc80d2/git)

## Stop searching one by one for roles like this.

Upload your resume or enter your target roles to see your first 3 matches for free.

[Find jobs for me →](https://jobradar.live/uye/kayit)
Your resume is never shared with employers; it is processed only for matching.

Something wrong with this job?

## Similar jobs

[Periodic Labs Jobs](https://jobradar.live/company/periodic-labs) · [Jobs in California](https://jobradar.live/jobs/california)
· [Data Scientist Jobs in California](https://jobradar.live/jobs/california/data-scientist) · [Jobs by location](https://jobradar.live/jobs) · [Jobs by company](https://jobradar.live/company)

- [Machine Learning Engineer](https://jobradar.live/ilan/77bf6b2f-691f-4448-b86a-f05244fd0626) ServiceNow · Santa Clara, CALIFORNIA, United States

- [Senior (DevOps) Machine Learning Engineer](https://jobradar.live/ilan/96447fe1-9876-46c8-8980-b17d1e1c70a2) ServiceNow · Santa Clara, CALIFORNIA, United States

- [AI Engineer, Fullstack](https://jobradar.live/ilan/1a3d5a0d-d73b-40b2-885c-b2261c10afef) Taste Labs · San Francisco, California, United States

- [Senior Applied AI Engineer](https://jobradar.live/ilan/6635b0e5-9c59-49bc-b3cc-9622ac9e48bb) Zania · Palo Alto, CA, California, United States

- [Research Scientist - Computational Chemistry](https://jobradar.live/ilan/f047f6a9-75f1-4a92-8176-b49b4c33e94e) Monarch · Emeryville, California, United States

- [ML Engineer](https://jobradar.live/ilan/c0e17582-7b8f-4be8-9033-30e47d4abbce) Monarch · Emeryville, California, United States

- [Software Engineer, Machine Learning Systems](https://jobradar.live/ilan/2fe10b89-a724-4218-87a7-d8e142ae5186) WindBorne Systems · RWC HQ, California, United States

- [Software Engineer, Machine Learning](https://jobradar.live/ilan/12be71a2-2fba-4fc4-b949-1965180c3030) Ema · San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA