ML Engineer — Tilde Research

San Francisco

**Location:** San Francisco, CA (Onsite) **Compensation:** $150,000 -- $350,000 base + 0.5% -- 1% equity **About Tilde Research** Tilde Research is a frontier AI research lab focused on mechanistic understanding of model architectures and optimization. They work on reasoning, pretraining, scaling laws, and architecture-level experimentation. Backed with strong funding and compute resources, Tilde operates with a small, highly selective team at the intersection of research and engineering. **About The Role** This is a research engineering role focused on implementing and scaling model development work at the frontier of AI. You will translate research ideas into working systems, own end-to-end training pipelines, and operate across transformer training, distributed systems, and evaluation. The role sits between research and engineering --- you're expected to read papers, implement architectures, debug large-scale training issues, and reason about model behavior and optimization at a deep level. What You'll Own * Implement research ideas in PyTorch or JAX and translate them into production-level systems * Run transformer training across distributed environments * Build and operate end-to-end pipelines covering data, training, and evaluation * Identify and resolve divergence, instability, and throughput issues at scale * Optimize training performance and system efficiency * Work closely with researchers to evaluate architectures and learning dynamics * Contribute to experimentation across model behavior and optimization strategies **Requirements** * Strong experience with PyTorch or JAX * Hands-on experience with transformer training, distributed systems, and evaluation frameworks * Ability to debug large-scale training issues including instability and performance bottlenecks * Experience implementing research ideas and custom architectures * Strong understanding of model behavior, optimization, and learning dynamics Nice to Have * Experience with Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, xformers, or similar frameworks * Background at frontier AI labs or top research engineering teams * Open source contributions to ML frameworks * Strong mathematical foundation in optimization or learning theory This Role Is NOT For * MLOps or infrastructure-focused profiles without model training experience * Applied ML roles not involved in pretraining or model development * Backgrounds focused on deployment rather than training systems Logistics * Role is fully onsite in San Francisco --- please only apply if you can commit to this * Multiple headcount \| Completely open pipeline --- strong opportunity to be first in Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by **David Joseph \& Co.**, the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of Tilde Research.