Applied Machine Learning Research Scientist

Cerebras Cerebras · Semiconductors · US and Canada Offices · Software

The Applied Machine Learning Research Scientist at Cerebras will focus on turning modern machine learning techniques into scalable, high-performance systems. This role involves implementing and improving workflows for LLM pretraining, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning-based post-training, including building training pipelines, debugging system behaviors, improving model quality, and iterating on data and evaluation strategies. The goal is to translate ML ideas into production-ready systems.

What you'd actually do

  1. Apply post-training techniques (e.g. RLVR, RLHF, GRPO etc.) techniques to improve model performance.
  2. Build and maintain evaluation pipelines to measure model performance across tasks and domains.
  3. Debug issues across the ML stack, including data pipelines, training jobs, model outputs and mixed or lower precision computation.
  4. Collaborate with researchers to translate ML ideas into efficient, scalable implementation.
  5. Design, implement, and scale ML pipelines across all stages of LLM development (pretraining, fine-tuning, alignment).

Skills

Required

  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • machine learning fundamentals
  • deep learning architectures
  • transformers
  • implement key ideas from ML papers

Nice to have

  • large language models (training, fine-tuning, and evaluation)
  • reinforcement learning concepts
  • distributed training frameworks (e.g., FSDP, Megatron)
  • large-scale datasets and data pipelines
  • debugging or optimizing ML systems for performance
  • Contributions to meaningful codebases, projects, or open-source systems

What the JD emphasized

  • not on publishing new algorithms
  • not just in theory

Other signals

  • building training pipelines
  • improving model quality
  • iterating on data and evaluation strategies
  • translating cutting-edge ML ideas into reliable, production-ready systems