Staff Applied Research Engineer

You have trained LLMs to be SOTA on specific tasks. You have opinions on whether sequence-level or token-level importance ratios are more effective. You probably shared the ScaleRL paper in your group chats, and kicked off a few ablations after you read it.

This is an applied research role. You will be expected to generate and investigate research ideas towards solving the remaining obstacles to continuous learning in production . You will work with the broader OpenPipe team to validate these research directions across real customer tasks. We are very GPU rich and are ready to direct an enormous amount of compute at this effort.

Beyond your role's specific qualifications, we're looking for strong engineers with great taste. The most important qualification by far is that you learn fast and can ship. This role will inevitably involve a lot of learning on the job; we're building this airplane as we fly it. Engineers on our team touch everything from CUDA kernels to high-performance LLM tracing dashboards, and you will have an opportunity to touch many parts of this stack. Although we operate as part of a larger company, the OpenPipe team is small, has a large degree of autonomy and drives our own roadmap and priorities. This is an excellent role for someone looking to found their own company in the future.

8+ years of experience in machine learning or applied research, or a PhD with 4+ years of relevant industry experience.

Demonstrated success developing LLM training methods or systems that produce meaningful improvements on real-world tasks.

Deep expertise in LLM post-training, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, on-policy distillation, reward modeling, and policy optimization.

Strong research judgment, including the ability to identify high-impact problems, design rigorous experiments, and make decisions from ambiguous results.

Experience taking research ideas from initial hypothesis through implementation, evaluation, and production deployment.

Proven ability to set technical direction, lead complex cross functional initiatives, and mentor other engineers.

We strive to use the best tool for the job when building and deploying our production services. Sometimes that means writing our own custom code, and often it means leaning on the work of others. As part of building Serverless RL , we depend on the following libraries and frameworks (among many others):

Kubernetes

Megatron

Temporal

Postgres

FastAPI

We believe in investing in our people, and value candidates who can bring their own diversified experiences to our teams – even if you aren't a 100% skill or experience match.

We work hard, have fun, and move fast! We're in an exciting stage of hyper growth that you will not want to miss out on. We're not afraid of a little chaos, and we're constantly learning. Our team cares deeply about how we build our product and how we work together, which is represented through our core values:

Be Curious at Your Core

Act Like an Owner

Empower Employees

Deliver Best-in-Class Client Experiences

Achieve More Together

We support and encourage an entrepreneurial outlook and independent thinking. We foster an environment that encourages collaboration and provides the opportunity to develop innovative solutions to complex problems. As we get set for takeoff, the growth opportunities within the organization are constantly expanding. You will be surrounded by some of the best talent in the industry, who will want to learn from you, too. Come join us!

The base salary range for this role is $207,000 to $275,000. The starting salary will be determined based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and market location. We strive for both market alignment and internal equity when determining compensation. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package includes a discretionary bonus, equity awards, and a comprehensive benefits program (all based on eligibility).

California Consumer Privacy Act

CoreWeave is an equal opportunity employer, committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive workplace. All qualified applicants and candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, or genetic information.

As part of this commitment and consistent with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) , CoreWeave will ensure that qualified applicants and candidates with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations for the hiring process, unless such accommodation would cause an undue hardship. If reasonable accommodation is needed, please contact: careers@coreweave.com .

This position requires access to export controlled information. To conform to U.S. Government export regulations applicable to that information, applicant must either be (A) a U.S. person, defined as a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful permanent resident (green card holder), (iii) refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, (B) eligible to access the export controlled information without a required export authorization, or (C) eligible and reasonably likely to obtain the required export authorization from the applicable U.S. government agency. CoreWeave may, for legitimate business reasons, decline to pursue any export licensing process.