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Research Engineer - Pre-training Data

Prime Intellect

Remote · USFull-time$150–350K/yrPosted 2w agoStill listed 6 days ago

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At a glance

Compensation
$150–350K/yr
Location
Remote · US
Schedule
Full-time
Work Authorization
Visa required • Visa sponsorship

Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.

Job overview

The Research Engineer will build data foundations for Prime Intellect’s open models by finding valuable sources, converting them into training-ready corpora, and working with researchers to test what improves model performance. The work supports broad pre-training and data for reasoning, coding, and long-context capabilities, including scalable processing, quality checks, data experiments, and dataset provenance.

Skills & qualifications

RequiredNice to have

Skills

Python (Programming Language)Data ProcessingData QualityWeb CrawlersBig DataDistributed ComputingData CurationDistributed SystemsLarge-Scale Data ManagementData Quality AnalysisResearch ExperimentationWeb CrawlingDocument ExtractionCode Data CollectionCorpus CurationDeduplicationText ClassificationQuality ScoringSynthetic DataContamination AnalysisData Mixture ExperimentsCurriculum LearningDataset EvaluationLanguage Model Pre-TrainingContinued Pre-TrainingMidtrainingSparkRayMultilingual DataMathematical DataScientific DataRepository-Level Code DataTokenizationTraining Data Loaders

Benefits

Relocation Assistance

Full job description

Own Your Intelligence Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team. Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own. Prime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators, including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more. We are looking for people who want to build at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a category that does not fully exist yet. Role Impact Build the data behind Prime Intellect’s next generation of open models. You’ll find valuable sources, turn them into training-ready corpora, and work with researchers to test what actually improves the model. Your work will shape both broad pre-training and the data used to develop reasoning, coding, and long-context capabilities. Responsibilities

  • Find, evaluate, and collect valuable training data from web, code, and technical sources.

  • Build scalable pipelines that turn raw data into training-ready corpora through extraction, cleaning, deduplication, and filtering.

  • Develop checks for data quality, coverage, and contamination, and use them to improve collection and processing.

  • Work with researchers on data mixtures and sampling strategies for pre-training and midtraining.

  • Prepare and evaluate data for long-context learning, reasoning, and coding, testing synthetic data where it proves useful.

  • Run controlled data experiments and use model evaluations to decide which sources, mixtures, and processing choices are worth scaling.

  • Make large-scale data processing efficient, reproducible, and recoverable, with clear source provenance and dataset versioning.

Requirements

  • Strong programming skills in Python and a record of building reliable data-processing or distributed systems.

  • Experience working with large datasets and managing the practical tradeoffs of storage, compute, throughput, and reproducibility.

  • Ability to diagnose data-quality issues and translate research goals into measurable checks and experiments.

  • Comfort owning an evolving technical problem end to end and working closely with researchers to test assumptions and improve the system.

Relevant experience may include:

  • Web crawling, document extraction, code-data collection, or large-scale corpus curation.

  • Deduplication, text classification, quality scoring, synthetic data, or training-data contamination analysis.

  • Data-mixture experiments, curriculum learning, or measuring how dataset changes affect model performance.

Nice to have

  • Experience preparing datasets for language-model pre-training, continued pre-training, or midtraining.

  • Work with distributed processing frameworks such as Spark, Ray, or comparable systems.

  • Experience with multilingual, mathematical, scientific, or repository-level code data.

  • Familiarity with tokenization, training data loaders, and the needs of large model-training runs.

Depth in data acquisition, scalable processing, or data research can be a strong starting point. We don’t expect every candidate to have worked across all of them. Benefits and Perks

  • Cash Compensation Range of $150-350k, including equity incentives, aligning your success with the growth and impact of Prime Intellect.

  • Flexible work arrangements, with the option to work remotely or in-person at our offices in San Francisco.

  • Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance for international candidates.

  • Quarterly team off-sites, hackathons, conferences and learning opportunities.

  • Opportunity to work with a talented, hard-working and mission-driven team, united by a shared passion for leveraging technology to accelerate science and AI.

If you're excited about the opportunity to build the foundation for the future of decentralized AI and create a platform that empowers developers and researchers to push the boundaries of what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.

How this job compares

Set against the 1,192 open Research Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 5, 2026.

Pay
  • This posting$150–350K/yr
  • California median$184–338K/yr405 salary ranges
  • US median$147–257K/yr867 salary ranges

This range's midpoint, $250K, is close to the California median midpoint ($254K) — in the middle half of Research Engineer salary ranges in California.

Openings
Olive Jobs lists 581 open Research Engineer jobs in California and 1,192 across the US. 6% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
Hiring the most in California
Experience
Research Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 3 years of experience at the median; the middle half ask for 2 to 5 years (672 postings).
Education
402 of the 1,192 open Research Engineer jobs (34%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.

Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 5, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.

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