Research Scientist, Scaling RL

Posted 18 Days Ago
Be an Early Applicant
2 Locations
In-Office
250K-350K Annually
Senior level
Artificial Intelligence • Hardware • Information Technology • Robotics
From bits to atoms.
The Role
Research Scientist developing and scaling reinforcement learning methods for frontier scientific language models. Responsibilities include designing compute-scaling experiments, improving policy optimization and credit assignment, developing adaptive sampling and curriculum strategies, studying training bias and stability, and improving training and inference efficiency. The role requires implementing and testing research ideas across complex training systems and transferring small-scale findings to large-scale runs.
Summary Generated by Built In
About Periodic Labs

We're an AI and physical sciences company building state-of-the-art models to accelerate breakthroughs across materials, energy, and beyond. Backed by world-class investors and growing rapidly, we operate at the pace the frontier requires. Our team brings deep expertise, genuine ownership, and a drive to push the boundaries of what's scientifically possible.

About the Role

We're training frontier models to develop deep scientific knowledge and reasoning for scientific tasks. You’ll study how RL scales with training compute, develop better algorithms, and take ideas from controlled experiments to our largest runs like Periodic Neon.

What You'll Do
  • Design experiments to understand how RL performance scales with compute, model size, data, and reward quality, building on work such as ScaleRL

  • Develop better RL algorithms, spanning policy optimization, advantage estimation, exploration, and credit assignment for long-horizon RL tasks

  • Build adaptive sampling and curriculum methods that adjust task difficulty, problem selection, and the number of rollouts as models improve

  • Study bias and stability during RL training, including importance-sampling corrections and methods to tackle policy staleness and training–inference mismatch, as discussed here.

  • Improve compute efficiency across training and inference through experiments with hyperparameters, such as length penalties, rollout counts, batch sizes, and update schedules.

You Will Thrive in This Role If You Have
  • Hands-on experience training LLMs with reinforcement learning

  • Strong attention to detail and rigorous approach to answer questions scientifically.

  • Coming up with small-scale RL setups that transfers to large-scale training runs.

  • Comfort working across a complex training stack to implement, debug, and test new research ideas.

  • We are open to offering a 1 year post-doc for this profile. Early career (final year PhD students) are encouraged to apply.

Mechanics
Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or similar experience

Location: Menlo Park, CA or Montreal, Canada

Compensation: $225,000-$350,000 base + equity

Visa sponsorship: Yes, we sponsor visas and will do everything we can to assist in this process.

 

Skills Required

  • 5+ years of experience
  • Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
  • Hands-on experience training large language models with reinforcement learning
  • Strong attention to detail and rigorous scientific approach
  • Ability to design small-scale reinforcement learning setups that transfer to large-scale training runs
  • Comfort working across complex training stacks to implement, debug, and test research ideas
Am I A Good Fit?
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The Company
32 Employees
Year Founded: 2025

What We Do

We're building AI scientists and the autonomous laboratories for them to operate.

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