Fall 2026

Research Scientist Intern

Pluralis Research

Pluralis Research

11-50 employees

Decentralized foundation-model training protocol

No salary listed

Melbourne VIC, Australia

Remote

Must work across Australian and United States time zones.

PhD

Category
AI & Machine Learning (1)
Required Skills
Distributed Systems
Neural Networks
PyTorch

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Requirements
  • Current PhD candidacy with at least one publication in top-tier machine learning venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.
  • A research focus in a core technical area relevant to frontier models.
  • Strong theoretical understanding of deep learning and distributed systems principles.
  • Proficiency in PyTorch and experience with large-scale training infrastructure.
  • Professional-level English proficiency in written and spoken English.
  • Comfort working across time zones and collaborating with a diverse, distributed group.
Responsibilities
  • Contribute to research in Protocol Learning during the PhD as part of a six-month research internship focused on publishing.
  • Conduct novel, publication-oriented research in Protocol Learning with the explicit goal of publishing in tier-one machine learning conferences.
  • Author foundational papers in an emerging field with access to significant compute and focused mentorship from senior scientists.

Pluralis Research develops a protocol for decentralized training and shared ownership of foundation models. The core product is a framework that enables collaborative, distributed model development, allowing multiple parties to contribute data and compute without centralizing control. Revenue likely comes from licensing the protocol and offering consulting services to help organizations implement decentralized training methods. The team includes former FAANG researchers who bring deep expertise in AI research and scalable systems. Pluralis differentiates itself by focusing on decentralized, ownership-enabled training for foundation models rather than traditional centralized approaches, aiming to reduce reliance on centralized data processing. The company's goal is to make it practical for organizations to jointly train and own sophisticated foundation models through a distributed, cooperative framework.

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

Seed

Total Funding

$7.6M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2024

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Pluralis is running open multi-participant training runs on pluralis.ai as of May 30, 2026.
  • ICML Seoul workshop and ICLR Rio talks show growing ecosystem validation in 2026.
  • The $7.6 million USV and CoinFund-backed round funds hiring and longer runway into 2026.

What critics are saying

  • Pluralis still lacks a product, leaving 2025 funding dependent on research execution.
  • Unextractability and communication-performance tradeoffs remain unsolved, risking a 2026 technical dead end.
  • Gensyn and others are attacking decentralized training directly, compressing Pluralis's differentiation window.

What makes Pluralis Research unique

  • Pluralis pursues protocol learning, keeping model weights unextractable across participants.
  • It positions unmaterializable training as a third path between closed and open weights.
  • It hosts 2026 workshops and open multi-participant runs, building research gravity around the protocol.

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Benefits

Remote Work Options

Flexible Work Hours

Company Equity

Relocation Assistance

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

33%

1 year growth

33%

2 year growth

53%
CoinRank
Mar 19th, 2025
Decentralized AI model Pluralis completes $7.6 million financing, led by USV and others

CoinRank News: Decentralized AI model Pluralis announced the completion of $7.6 million in Pre-Seed and Seed rounds of financing, led by CoinFund and Union Square Ventures, with participation from Topology, Variant, Eden Block and Bodhi Ventures, cryptocurrency investor Balaji Srinivasan and AI platform HuggingFace co-founder Clem Delangue.

Fortune
Mar 19th, 2025
Exclusive: Pluralis raises $7.6 million from prominent investors to take on OpenAI with big decentralized models

On Wednesday, Pluralis announced that it had secured $7.6 million in pre-seed and seed funding, led by the venture capital firms CoinFund and Union Square Ventures.

GlobeNewswire
Mar 19th, 2025
Pluralis Research Pioneers Protocol Learning to Scale Decentralized AI, Announces $7.6M Seed Round Led by USV and CoinFund

Founded in early 2024, Pluralis is a team of ex-FAANG research scientists led by Alexander Long who have spent a number of years working together. The organization is dedicated to solving the research challenges required to realize protocol learning in practice and is currently hiring in all areas.