ML Engineer - Tilde Research

Job Description Job Description ML Engineer — Tilde Research 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.