Machine Learning Researcher / Engineer - Foundation Models

Machine Learning Researcher / Engineer (Foundation Models)

Pathway · Palo Alto, United States (Hybrid) · Full-time · Posted 2025-11-14

Workplace: hybrid

Department: R&D

Description

About Pathway

Pathway builds the first post-transformer frontier model that enables recurrent reasoning and recurrent memory, unbounded context, and real-time adaptation. We're not optimizing yesterday's technology; we're building what comes after Transformers.

Pathway is currently scaling its internal models from billions of parameters towards hundreds of billions of parameters, aiming at achieving differentiated frontier intelligence.

Pathway is led by co-founder & CEO Zuzanna Stamirowska, a complexity scientist who created a team consisting of AI pioneers, including CTO Jan Chorowski who was the first person to apply Attention to speech and worked with Nobel laureate Geoff Hinton at Google Brain, as well as CSO Adrian Kosowski, a leading computer scientist and quantum physicist who obtained his PhD at the age of 20. 

The company is backed by leading investors, as well as advisors including Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of the Transformer (“the T” in ChatGPT) and a key researcher behind OpenAI’s reasoning models, and Jonathan Frankle, Chief AI Scientist at Databricks and Co-founder at Mosaic. Pathway is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

The Opportunity

This is an R&D position in attention-based models.

We are currently searching for 1 or 2 R&D Engineers with a strong track record in machine learning models research.

This is an extremely ambitious foundational project. There is a flexible GPU budget associated with this specific project, guaranteed to be in the 7-digit range minimum.

You Will

• perform (distributed) model training.
• help improve/adapt model architectures based on experiment results.
• design new tasks and experiments.
• optionally: oversee activities of team members involved in data preparation.

The results of your work will play a crucial role in the success of the project.

Requirements

Cover letter

It's always a pleasure to say hi! If you could leave us 2-3 lines, we'd really appreciate that.

You are expected to meet at least one of the following criteria:

1. You have published at least one paper at NeurIPS, ICLR, or ICML - where you were the lead author or made significant conceptual & code contributions.
2. You have significantly contributed to an LLM training effort which became newsworthy (topped a Huggingface benchmark, best in class model, etc.), preferably using multiple GPU's.
3. You have spent at least 6 months working in a leading Machine Learning research center (e.g. at: Google Brain / Deepmind, Apple, Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, MILA).
4. You were an ICPC World Finalist, or an IOI, IMO, or IPhO medalist in High School.

You Are

• A deep learning researcher, with a track record in Language Models and/or RL (candidates with a Vision or Robotics ML background are also welcome to apply).
• Interested in improving foundational architectures and creating new benchmarks.
• Experienced at hands-on experiments and model training (PyTorch, Jax, or Tensorflow).
• Have a good understanding of GPU architecture, memory design, and communication.
• Have a good understanding of graph algorithms.
• Have some familiarity with model monitoring, git, build systems, and CI/CD.
• Respectful of others
• Fluent in English

Bonus Points

• Knowledge of approaches used in distributed training.
• Familiarity with Triton
• Successful track-record in algorithms & data science contests.
• Showing a code portfolio.

Why You Should Apply

• Join an intellectually stimulating work environment.
• Be a pioneer: you get to work with a new type of "Live AI" challenges around long sequences and changing data.
• Be part of one of an early-stage AI startup that believes in impactful research and foundational changes.

Benefits

• Type of contract: Full-time, permanent
• Preferable joining date: Immediate. The positions are open until filled – please apply immediately.
• Compensation: six-digit annual salary based on profile and location + Employee Stock Option Plan.
• Location: Remote work. Possibility to work or meet with other team members in one of our offices: Palo Alto, CA; Paris, France or Wroclaw, Poland. Candidates based anywhere in the EU, UK, United States, and Canada will be considered.

If you meet our broad requirements but are missing some experience, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Apply

Apply at Pathway

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