Founding ML Systems Engineering Lead - Training | Superintelligence Lab

About Us

We are a new superintelligence lab pioneering a paradigm shift in the development of AI systems through a scientifically feasible path to superintelligence. Founded by industry veterans and world-renowned academic professors. More information about us at https://eqe.ai.

As a Founding ML Systems Engineer, you will be a core member of the founding technical team, working alongside the Head of AI Algorithms to design, implement, and scale the training systems that enable next-generation language models beyond standard transformer architectures. 

This is a hands-on role at the intersection of large-scale model training, systems engineering, and advanced model architectures. You will own the engineering foundation that allows novel looped and recurrent language models to scale efficiently, unlocking new capabilities in reasoning, efficiency, and deployability.

What You Will Do

• Architect and implement large-scale training systems for non-standard LLM architectures, including looped and recurrent language models.

• Design and build sequence-iteration parallelization and pipelining strategies to overcome back-propagation-through-time bottlenecks in recurrent models.

• Lead performance engineering efforts across the training stack, including memory optimization, kernel efficiency, and parallel execution.

• Work deeply with JAX (preferred) and/or PyTorch, optimizing distributed training across multi-node, multi-accelerator setups.

• Implement and optimize CUDA kernels where necessary to unlock performance beyond existing frameworks.

• Scale training to billion-parameter-class models, leveraging tensor, pipeline, and sequence parallelism.

• Enable efficient distillation of large models into looped architectures and support fine-tuning on reasoning-focused datasets.

• Collaborate closely with the Head of AI Algorithms to translate new algorithmic ideas into scalable, production-grade training systems.

• Help define the technical roadmap, establish best practices, and, over time, build and lead a small, elite ML systems team.

Who You Are

• A senior-level ML systems engineer with deep hands-on experience training large language models (≥1B parameters).

• Strong background in distributed training, including tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and performance bottleneck analysis.

• Expert-level proficiency in JAX or PyTorch, with a strong preference for JAX-based systems engineering.

• Comfortable working close to the metal: CUDA programming, memory optimization, and kernel-level performance tuning.

• Able to reason about trade-offs across compute, memory, throughput, and model quality.

• Experienced in translating cutting-edge ideas into robust, scalable engineering systems.

• Ownership-driven, with a founder mindset: you take responsibility for outcomes, not just implementations.

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and shaping systems that do not yet exist.

Big Plus

• Experience with model distillation and teacher-student training pipelines.

• Familiarity with recurrent or looped architectures, stateful models, or non-transformer approaches.

• Prior experience at frontier AI labs, hyperscalers, or deep-tech startups.

• Experience building or leading high-impact engineering teams.

Why Join Us

• Founder-level impact: This is a core founding role. You will help define not just how we train models, but what becomes possible.

• Work with world-class talent: You will collaborate closely with some of the world's leading researchers and engineers in AI, neuroscience-inspired computing, and advanced model architectures.

• Real frontier work: We are not optimizing today's transformers, we are building the training systems that enable fundamentally new classes of models.

• Technical ownership: You will have genuine authority over architecture, systems design, and long-term technical direction.

• Right-time entry: We are immediately pre-funding, offering a rare opportunity to join at maximum leverage, before scale-up and institutionalization.

• You will be working with the world's leading AI pioneers and academics at the professor level.

Compensation & Equity

• This is an equity-only, founder-like role. Cash compensation after funding round close in a few months.

• Meaningful equity ownership commensurate with founding-team responsibility and long-term impact.

• This role is intended for someone who views equity as the primary upside and is aligned with building a category-defining company from first principles.

• Post-funding compensation will be revisited, but equity ownership is the core of this role.

• We are explicitly looking for individuals who are motivated by ownership, mission, and long-term impact, not short-term salary.

Closing Note

If you are excited by the idea of building the systems that make next-generation intelligence possible, and want to do so as a true founding team member, this role offers a rare opportunity to work at the frontier of AI with exceptional autonomy and responsibility.