Hybrid Research Engineer – Machine Learning

at Aldea

• Job title: Research Engineer – Machine Learning
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Node.js, PyTorch
• Location requirements: Hybrid, San Francisco, United States

About the role

• Research Engineer developing infrastructure for Aldea's multi-modal AI research team. Building systems that support rapid experimentation at billion-parameter scale in language and speech domains.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain distributed training infrastructure supporting researchers across language and speech domains at a billion-plus-parameter scale.
• Optimize training and inference performance across the stack, delivering significant speedups through framework optimization, custom kernels, and system-level improvements.
• Design experiment infrastructure including automated evaluation pipelines, experiment tracking, and monitoring systems that enable rapid iteration.
• Scale infrastructure from single-node to multi-node distributed training and deploy production inference systems for real-time applications.
• Support researchers with fast turnaround on infrastructure issues and maintain high reliability across all systems.
• Collaborate with research scientists, data engineers, and leadership to define technical priorities and infrastructure roadmap.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3+ years of experience with PyTorch and distributed training frameworks (DDP, FSDP, DeepSpeed, or similar).
• Experience training large-scale deep learning models at 1B+ parameters.
• Deep understanding of training optimization techniques including mixed precision, gradient checkpointing, and memory management.
• Proven ability to build production-grade ML infrastructure with high reliability.
• Track record of delivering significant performance optimizations in ML training or inference systems.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary
• Performance-based bonus aligned with research and model milestones
• Equity participation
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible paid time off