Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Midtraining
Periodic Labs
Menlo Park, CA · Posted September 30, 2026
Just laid off? Start here: a plan for the first weeks
See every open role at Periodic Labs
More in California job market · All Research Scientist jobs (198) · Technology & Software · Engineering jobs
More roles at Periodic Labs
- Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Materials Data · Menlo Park, CA
- Process Safety Engineer · Menlo Park, CA
- Automation Engineer · Menlo Park, CA
- Research Scientist, Thin Films · Menlo Park, CA
- Head of Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) · Menlo Park, CA
- Process Engineer, Powder · Menlo Park, CA
Similar jobs
- Sr Principal Engineer AI/ML · GlobalFoundries · Santa Clara, CA
- #Machine Learning Engineer - Generative AI · Qualcomm Technologies · San Diego, CA
- Developer Relations Manager, Higher Education and Research - Foundational AI · Nvidia · Santa Clara, CA
- Computer Scientist (Ph.D.) · Exponent · Menlo Park, CA
- Electrical Engineer/Scientist/Computer Scientist (Ph.D.) · Exponent · Los Angeles, CA
- Staff People Analyst - Applied AI · Intuit · Mountain View, CA
Where Menlo Park, CA ranks
Where Menlo Park, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #5Best cities for AI-skill jobs in the West Coast32% · of 71
- #6Best cities for financial services pay after cost of living$164k · of 33
- #6Best cities for AI-skill jobs32% · of 100
- #7Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast21% · of 54
- #11Best all-round cities for AI careers in the West Coast75 / 100 · of 39
- #12Best cities for pay after cost of living in California$169k · of 32
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing does not state pay. Across 62 open research scientist listings that state pay, the middle half runs $195,500 to $300,000 and the median is $239,500.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among computer and information research scientists, AI is already used for a large share of the tasks. Measured exposure for computer and information research scientists: 34% (high).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
About the job
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.
- Experience on a dedicated evals team supporting a large production training run.
- Hands-on use of self-distillation, on-policy distillation, or similar methods in a real training pipeline.
- Experience with scaling laws and compute-optimal hyperparameters.
- Comfort working across data, evals, and training infrastructure.
ESPECIALLY STRONG CANDIDATES MAY ALSO HAVE
- Experience optimizing throughput and reliability for large-scale distributed training runs.
- A background in AI for science or training on specialized domain data (e.g., protein, materials, or other scientific datasets).
- Experience creating evals or synthetic data for non verifiable tasks and tracking performance over live runs.
MECHANICS
- Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or similar experience
- Location: Menlo Park, CA
- Compensation: $250,000–$350,000 + equity
- Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this process.