Job Details

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company's culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.



Title of Role: Member of Engineering, Pre-training/Data
Location: Remote (East Coast or EMEA preferred)
Company Stage of Funding: Series B (Series C closing soon, $600M+ raised)
Office Type: Remote
Salary: $240,000 - $400,000 base + highly competitive equity
Company Description

We are representing a frontier AI lab focused on building some of the most capable foundational models in the world. Unlike many AI startups, this company both trains its own large-scale models and ships a developer-facing product, backed by hundreds of millions in venture funding. The team is engineering-first, led by proven leaders from top-tier technology companies, and dedicated to pushing the boundaries of what AI can do for software development.

The company is growing rapidly and seeking world-class engineers to join their data team, where you will help shape the future of AI-powered development.
What You Will Do

• Build and optimize massive-scale pretraining datasets of natural language and source code to improve LLM performance.
• Design, experiment with, and analyze data ablations, data mix optimization, and synthetic data generation techniques.
• Collaborate closely with pre-training, fine-tuning, and product teams to ensure short feedback loops on model quality.
• Stay at the forefront of the latest research in dataset design and LLM pretraining, rapidly iterating on experiments to improve quality.
• Deploy solutions into high-performance distributed data pipelines running on large GPU clusters.

• 3+ years of industry experience as a research scientist or engineer.
• Strong background in machine learning AND engineering.
• Proven experience building large-scale pretraining datasets and running experiments such as ablations or mixture modeling.
• Prior hands-on involvement in LLM pretraining, including training models from scratch.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, data pipelines, and large GPU cluster operations.
• Passion for data quality and applied experimentation.

• Degree in Computer Science or related technical field.
• Strong programming skills, including Python, plus low-level languages such as C/C++, CUDA, or Triton.
• Experience with DevOps tooling (Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform).
• Author of published research in ML/LLMs.
• Experience generating and working with synthetic data.
• Willingness to travel occasionally (e.g., to Europe for team sessions).

• Base Salary: $240,000 - $400,000 depending on experience.
• Equity: Highly competitive package.
• Visa Sponsorship: Available for exceptional candidates.
• Remote Work: Flexible, with preference for East Coast U.S. or EMEA time zones.
• Work Environment: Join an engineering-first culture (over 75% of the team are engineers) working alongside leaders from GitHub, Snap, and other top companies.
• Impact: Architect the data pipelines powering foundational models that will define the future of AI-assisted software development.