AI Research Engineer

About The Role:

The NEAR AI team is building decentralized and confidential machine learning infrastructure to enable user-owned AI. Our mission is to make open-source AI truly accessible by bringing together researchers worldwide to advance model research, fine-tuning, and large-scale training. We are seeking a Research Engineer with a strong background in large language models (LLMs) and reasoning systems to help push the boundaries of AI innovation.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Designing and executing fine-tuning pipelines for open-weight LLMs across diverse use cases, from concept to deployment.
• Conducting research on novel reasoning architectures and training methods to improve model performance.
• Collaborating with researchers and engineers across institutions to accelerate progress in AI research.
• Contributing to open-source projects and advancing best practices in decentralized AI development.

What We're Looking For:

• Strong hands-on experience in LLM training, fine-tuning, and evaluation.
• Deep understanding of reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in the context of reasoning.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to communicate technical ideas clearly to diverse collaborators.
• A passion for advancing open and decentralized AI ecosystems.

We'd Love If You Have:

• Experience with formal verification
• Experience with trusted execution environment (TEE)
• Contributions to open-source machine learning libraries

Please let us know if you require any special requirements for your interview and we’ll do our best to accommodate.

Locations: San Francisco.