Research Engineer - Midtraining

Periodic Labs is an AI and physical sciences company building state-of-the-art models to accelerate breakthroughs across materials, energy, and beyond. The Midtraining Research Engineer will improve scientific reasoning in base models by curating and generating data, building evaluations, applying distillation techniques, and running large-scale training experiments. The role also supports future pre-training efforts and collaborates with researchers and infrastructure engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Identify, process, and curate novel sources of scientific data for large-scale model training
• Generate high-quality synthetic data to fill gaps in scientific knowledge and reasoning
• Build evaluations that correlate with downstream scientific task performance, working closely with RL researchers, physicists, and chemists
• Develop and apply techniques such as self-distillation and on-policy distillation to improve model capability
• Design and run large-scale training experiments, partnering with supercompute engineers to scale efficiently across thousands of GPUs
• Build tools for yourself and the team to investigate how data choices shape model intelligence