Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Midtraining

Periodic Labs is an AI and physical sciences company building models to accelerate breakthroughs in materials, energy, and related fields. The Midtraining Research Engineer will improve frontier models’ scientific reasoning by curating and generating training data, building evaluations, applying distillation techniques, and running large-scale training experiments.

Responsibilities:

• Identify, process, and curate novel sources of scientific data for large-scale model training
• Generate high-quality synthetic data to fill gaps in scientific knowledge and reasoning
• Build evaluations that correlate with downstream scientific task performance, working closely with RL researchers, physicists, and chemists
• Develop and apply techniques such as self-distillation and on-policy distillation to improve model capability
• Design and run large-scale training experiments, partnering with supercompute engineers to scale efficiently across thousands of GPUs
• Build tools for yourself and the team to investigate how data choices shape model intelligence