Essential AI’s mission is to deepen the partnership between humans and computers, unlocking collaborative capabilities that far exceed what could be achieved today. We believe that building delightful end-user experiences requires innovating across the stack - from the UX all the way down to models that achieve the best user value per FLOP.

We believe that a small, focused team of motivated individuals can create outsized breakthroughs. We are building a world-class multi-disciplinary team who are excited to solve hard real-world AI problems. We are well-capitalized and supported by March Capital and Thrive Capital, with participation from AMD, Franklin Venture Partners, Google, KB Investment, NVIDIA.

The Role

The Research Scientist, Pre-Training will play a pivotal role in advancing our foundation models to advance the science at large and the unique challenges and requirements of our customers. You will be responsible for frontier algorithms and conducting research experiments to improve the pre-training process, with the goal of creating more capable, robust, and efficient models. You will also explore ways to scale up pre-training to larger datasets and model sizes, while maintaining efficiency and performance.

What you’ll be working on

• You will lead or be a core contributor to our research bets that advance the the real-world capabilities of our models.

• You will collaborate closely with our data and product teams to close the loop between research and product, identify capability gaps and evaluate progress.

• Lead long-term research initiatives focused on pre-training models for enterprises. Work closely with research engineers to prototype, understand, implement and deploy novel techniques to improve the capabilities of our models.

• Develop novel algorithms and methodologies for pre-training models ensuring scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness.

• Design, develop, and optimize machine learning models and prototypes, ensuring high performance, scalability, and robustness.

• Stay abreast of the latest advancements in pre-training techniques incorporating relevant findings into research projects and product development efforts

What we are looking for

• Research experience with a focus on pre-training and building large language models using frameworks such as Megatron, DeepSpeed, MaxText, etc.

• You have strong ML fundamentals and first principles thinking that guides your approach to research.

• You have experience of coming up with new methods or improving existing techniques in ML or related fields

• Experience with data engineering and preprocessing, in particular, optimization of data pipelines.

• Proficiency in programming languages commonly used in machine learning research such as Python

• Strong problem solving, analytical, communication, and collaboration skills.

• You enjoy building things from the ground up in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

We encourage you to apply for this position even if you don’t check all of the above requirements but want to spend time pushing on these techniques.

We are based in-person in SF. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.