About the Institute of Foundation Models

We are a dedicated research lab for building, understanding, using, and risk-managing foundation models. Our mandate is to advance research, nurture the next generation of AI builders, and drive transformative contributions to a knowledge-driven economy.

As part of our team, you’ll have the opportunity to work on the core of cutting-edge foundation model training, alongside world-class researchers, data scientists, and engineers, tackling the most fundamental and impactful challenges in AI development. You will participate in the development of groundbreaking AI solutions that have the potential to reshape entire industries. Strategic and innovative problem-solving skills will be instrumental in establishing MBZUAI as a global hub for high-performance computing in deep learning, driving impactful discoveries that inspire the next generation of AI pioneers.

The Role

IFM is building the foundational compute infrastructure that will power tomorrow’s breakthroughs in AI and computational science. We’re looking for a High Performance Computing Software Engineer to help us design, develop, and operate the software systems that run our large-scale AI workloads.

In this role, you’ll work at the intersection of high-performance computing and machine learning. You’ll be part of a team responsible for crafting the software stack that enables training of cutting-edge ML models—spanning 1000+ GPUs—and ensuring our infrastructure is robust, performant, and developer-friendly.

Job Responsibilities

Design and implement high-performance, distributed software solutions for large-scale AI/ML training.
Optimize low-level system components including Linux kernel, GPU/accelerator kernels, and interconnects.
Develop and tune communication libraries such as NCCL, MPI, UCX, RCCL, and RDMA-based systems.
Partner with ML researchers and engineers to support frameworks like PyTorch, MegatronLM, and DeepSpeed in large-scale production environments.
Contribute to our scheduling, orchestration, and job management systems, including Slurm and Kubernetes.
Debug and resolve complex issues across the stack—from kernel to container to model.
Work closely with hardware vendors, upstream open-source communities, and internal teams to drive performance and reliability improvements.

Skills & Experience

Proven experience developing and optimizing software for large-scale ML workloads (1000+ GPUs preferred).
Deep understanding of Linux kernel internals and accelerator (GPU) kernel development.
Proficiency with distributed communication libraries (e.g., NCCL, RCCL, MPI, UCX, SHARP, Libfabric).
Experience with ML frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or MegatronLM.
Strong knowledge of HPC job scheduling and orchestration tools (e.g., Slurm, Kubernetes, Pyxis).
Excellent debugging and systems performance tuning skills.
A collaborative mindset with a focus on shared success and technical excellence.

About the company

IFM builds and studies foundation models—large AI models designed to learn broadly from diverse data and be used across many tasks. Its work centers on academic research to create open, fast, and practical models that address real-world societal needs, rather than narrow applications. The models are developed by a global team across Abu Dhabi, Paris, and Silicon Valley, with a strong emphasis on openness and collaboration to advance AI science and accessibility. Unlike typical private labs that lock models behind paywalls, IFM aims to provide publicly accessible, efficient models that can be used by researchers and developers to solve real problems. The overarching goal is to push the science of foundation models forward while ensuring their benefits reach society at large.

Company Size

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Company Stage

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Total Funding

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Headquarters

United Arab Emirates

Founded

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

AWS, Cerebras, Nebius, Hugging Face, vLLM, and SGLang already distribute K2 Horizon.
October 2026 benchmark chatter praises K2 Horizon's small models and 375B enterprise flagship.
MBZUAI's October 2026 hiring surge supports rapid expansion across agents, world models, and infrastructure.

What critics are saying

Open-sourcing K2 Horizon hands competitors reproducible recipes, shrinking IFM's moat by 2027.
MBZUAI listed 45 IFM vacancies on October 2, 2026, signaling heavy execution strain.
If K2 Horizon misses commercial adoption, IFM remains a prestige lab dependent on state capital.

What makes Institute of Foundation Models unique

September 3, 2026 K2 Horizon shipped six fully open models with weights, code, and data.
IFM offers Apache 2.0 frontier models, unlike closed labs protecting training recipes and checkpoints.
MBZUAI-backed labs in Abu Dhabi, Silicon Valley, and Paris combine research depth with deployment access.

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Benefits

Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Paid Vacation
Paid Holidays
Parental Leave
Employee Assistance Program
Life Insurance
Disability Insurance
401(k) Plan
Wellness Program
Flexible Work Hours

Company News

PR Newswire

Oct 15th, 2026

Jais 3 launches with six open Arabic models, up to 375B parameters, plus dialect-aware speech recognition

The Institute of Foundation Models (IFM), part of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, and Inception42 launched Jais 3, a fleet of Arabic-native AI models, on October 15, 2026. It pairs six open language models, from 900 million to 375 billion parameters, with Jais Speech, a speech recognition model for Arabic and its dialects. The models are built on K2 Horizon, IFM's open-source fleet released in September. They handle Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects, and can plan tasks, search the web, and produce Arabic documents and presentations. In the companies' tests on 24 Arabic benchmarks, the largest model matched the best open models on Arabic understanding and led on agentic tasks. Jais Speech recorded the lowest error rates among models compared. Jais 3 is available on Hugging Face. IFM is also releasing its benchmarks and code.

PR Newswire

Sep 3rd, 2026

Institute of Foundation Models launches K2 Horizon: largest fully open-source AI model fleet with weights, code, and training data

The Institute of Foundation Models has launched K2 Horizon, a fleet of six fully open-source AI models ranging from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters. The models include weights, code, training data, and methodologies, allowing researchers and developers to inspect and reproduce the work. The 0.9B, 3.7B, and 7B models set new benchmarks at their respective scales. The smallest model can run on watches and glasses, whilst the 3.7B and 7B models work on phones. The dense 32B model and sparse 36B model suit local hosting, and the 375B flagship model targets enterprise deployments. Launched by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in May 2025, IFM now operates across Silicon Valley, Paris, and Abu Dhabi. The models are available through Hugging Face, vLLM, and SGLang, with API access through partners including AWS and Cerebras. All models use the Apache 2.0 licence.

Institute of Foundation Models

High Performance Computing Software Engineer - Supercomputing

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