Senior / Staff ML Engineer (AI Research)

The role

This role is for Nebius AI R&D, a team focused on applied research and the development of AI-heavy products. Examples of applied research that we have recently published include:

• investigating how test-time guided search can be used to build more powerful agents;
• dramatically scaling task data collection to power reinforcement learning for SWE agents;
• maximizing efficiency of LLM training on agentic trajectories.

One example of an AI product that we are deeply involved in is Nebius AI Studio — an inference and fine-tuning platform for AI models.

We are currently looking for senior- and staff-level ML engineers to work on research in areas such as:

• Guided search and reinforcement learning for agentic systems.
• Reinforcement learning for reasoning models.
• Web-scale problem collection for training agents.
• Efficient model distillation.

Some examples of what your responsibilities might include are: 

• Conducting experiments to figure out efficient ways to train a large language model on traces of interactions with various environments.
• Exploring methods of guided generation and search in the trajectory space
• Coming up with ways to mine relevant data at web scale and figuring out efficient ways to use this data in model post-training.
• Ensuring that infrastructure for running models on agentic tasks is robust and performant

We expect you to have:

• A profound understanding of theoretical foundations of machine learning and reinforcement learning.
• Deep expertise in modern deep learning for language processing and generation
• Substantial experience with training large models on multiple computational nodes
• Reasonable understanding of performance aspects of large neural network training (sharding strategies, custom kernels, hardware features etc.)
• Strong software engineering skills (we mostly use python)
• Deep experience with modern deep learning frameworks (we use jax)
• Proficiency in contemporary software engineering approaches, including CI/CD, version control and unit testing
• Strong communication and leadership abilities

Nice to have:

• Experience with deep reinforcement learning for LLMs, including techniques such as reward modeling, DPO, PPO etc.
• Familiarity with important ideas in LLM space, such as MHA, RoPE, ZeRO/FSDP, Flash Attention, quantization
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related field Master’s or PhD preferred
• Track record of building and delivering products (not necessarily ML-related) in a dynamic startup-like environment
• Experience in engineering complex systems, such as large distributed data processing systems or high-load web services
• Open-source projects that showcase your engineering prowess
• Excellent command of the English language, alongside superior writing, articulation, and communication skills