Research Engineer

San Francisco on site Until 8/22/2026 First posted March 21, 2025 Last posted March 21, 2025
Job description

Magic’s mission is to build safe AGI that accelerates humanity’s progress on the world’s most important problems. We believe the most promising path to safe AGI lies in automating research and code generation to improve models and solve alignment more reliably than humans can alone. Our approach combines frontier-scale pre-training, domain-specific RL, ultra-long context, and inference-time compute to achieve this goal.

About the role

As a Research Engineer, you’ll work on training, evaluating, and serving large AI models and new inference-time compute techniques, build internet-scale datasets, and help prototype new research and product ideas.

What you'll work on

  • Optimize inference throughput for novel model architectures

  • Contribute to frameworks used for our research and production workloads

  • Train trillion-parameter models on large GPU clusters

  • Curate post-training datasets to improve targeted capabilities

  • Build out internet-scale data pipelines and crawlers

  • Design, prototype, and optimize new model architectures

  • Contribute to research across long-context, inference-time compute, RL, and more

What we’re looking for

  • Strong general software engineering skills

  • Thorough knowledge of the deep learning literature

  • Experience with pre- and post-training of LLMs

  • Ability to come up with and evaluate research ideas 

  • Experience working with large distributed systems

  • Ability to handle large ETL workloads

Compensation, benefits, and perks (US)

  • Annual salary ranges between $225K - $550K based on experience

  • Equity is a significant part of total compensation, in addition to salary

  • 401(k) plan with 6% salary matching

  • Generous health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents

  • Unlimited paid time off

  • Visa sponsorship and relocation stipend to bring you to SF, if possible

  • A small, fast-paced, highly focused team

Magic strives to be the place where high-potential individuals can do their best work. We value quick learning and grit just as much as skill and experience.

Our culture

  • Integrity. Words and actions should be aligned

  • Hands-on. At Magic, everyone is building

  • Teamwork. We move as one team, not N individuals

  • Focus. Safely deploy AGI. Everything else is noise

  • Quality. Magic should feel like magic

Compensation (from employer):
$225K – $550K

About this role

Summary

Work on training, evaluating, and optimizing large AI models and research techniques.

Job title

Research Engineer

Experience level

not specified

Industry

software

Location requirements

San Francisco, on-site, relocation possible, remote not specified

Salary

$225K – $550K

Management role

No

Skills & keywords

Required skills

software engineeringdeep learninglarge language modelsETL workloads

Preferred skills

deep learninglarge distributed systemsETLresearch evaluationmodel architectures

Specializations

AIMLdeep learninglarge language modelsdistributed systems
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

San Francisco, CA, USA

On-site City