The Token Company ML Researcher

The Token Company — ML Researcher Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CA Compensation: $150,000–$300,000 + 0.5%–1% equity Hiring count: 1 Visa sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, O-1, OPT Reports to: Founder The Role As an ML Researcher, you own a slice of one of the most interesting open problems in applied AI: figuring out what information inside an LLM context actually matters, and how to represent it more efficiently. This is a high‑autonomy, high‑output role for someone who wants to run a large volume of experiments, reproduce papers, and see their research ship into a production system used by real customers. What You'll Be Doing Design and run experiments on LLM context compression and mechanistic interpretability, including model training, data curation, labeling pipelines, and evals. Read current research papers and generate longer‑term ideas for representing context more efficiently for LLMs. Own your research direction end‑to‑end, from hypothesis through training runs on NVIDIA B200s and large‑scale GPU clusters to evaluation and production impact. Contribute to the eval infrastructure that measures how model outputs change and how compression affects accuracy and latency. Iterate quickly on new architectures and training methods, treating shipping a model into the product as the primary success condition. Tech stack: Transformers, custom model training loops (data + architecture + training + evals), NVIDIA B200s and large‑scale GPU clusters, eval infrastructure. Requirements Prioritize production impact over publication metrics. Own model training stack including data, architecture, training, evaluation, and shipping. Trained models from scratch, end‑to‑end ownership of data, architecture, and training loop. Strong ML fundamentals: transformers, mechanistic interpretability, LLM research. High‑agency researcher: self‑directed, experiment‑driven, not RAG or chatbot‑only. Spiky profile: exceptional pre‑career achievement in competitions, research, or founding. SF in‑person, 996 intensity, hacker‑house environment. Green Flags Pretrained a transformer model. Serious post‑training or RL experience on transformers. Built novel architecture or training method with results. Shipped trained models into production systems. Experience in research labs, startups, or scale‑ups. Exceptional early‑career achievement. Red Flags Experience mostly in RAG, agents, or prompt engineering. Primary focus on fine‑tuning existing models through APIs. Preference for publishing papers over shipping models. Work‑life balance as a stated priority. Role Details Salary — $150,000–$300,000 (above $300K possible for exceptional candidates) Equity — 0.5%–1% Experience — 2+ years On‑site policy — On‑site in San Francisco; hacker‑house environment; ~996 pace (9am–9pm, six days/week) or more Visa sponsorship — H-1B, O-1, OPT Employment type — Full‑time Location — San Francisco, CA #J-18808-Ljbffr David Joseph