# Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Midtraining at Periodic Labs

- Company: Periodic Labs
- Status: Open
- Workplace: On-site
- Location: Menlo Park, CA
- Level: Mid-level
- Discipline: AI & ML
- Employment: Full-time
- Posted: 2026-09-30
- Skills: Engineering
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/periodic-labs/168dbf20-2230-49a0-9f00-f2ff58dad5c8

## Description

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.

 

More Periodic Labs roles: https://deviantjobs.com/companies/periodic-labs