Machine Learning Engineer (Agency and Reasoning Team)

About Zyphra

At Zyphra, we're building Maia—a cutting-edge multimodal agent system that combines advanced research in neural network architectures, long-term memory, and reinforcement learning. Based in Palo Alto, our team brings together talent from leading AI organizations including Google DeepMind, Anthropic, StabilityAI, Qualcomm, Neuralink, Nvidia, and Apple.

Machine Learning Engineer (Agency and Reasoning Team)

About this role:

You would be a core contributor to Zyphra’s Agency and Reasoning Team. You will be involved with performing novel research in reinforcement learning, post-training, and human preference learning and applying your ideas at scale to our next generation of language models. 

Requirements:

• Strong research taste and intuition. The ability to work through a research project from conception to execution to write-up.

• Strong implementation and prototyping ability – can take an idea from conception to experimentation extremely quickly.

• The ability to work well and cooperate with others in a high-paced research setting.

Good to have:

• Experience and aptitude with reinforcement learning either in the context of language model reasoning or more classical RL tasks

• Experience with language model supervised finetuning and preference learning methods such as DPO, simPO, etc. 

• Experience with context-length extension methods

• A good intuitive ability to understand model behaviors and correct them through iterative finetuning

• Interest in grappling in detail with data and spending significant time involved in data engineering and synthetic data generation

• Postgraduate degree in scientific subject (Computer Science, EE/EECS, Mathematics, Physics)

• Previously published machine learning research in well-respected venues

• Highly proficient with Pytorch and Python

• Are excited and able to rapidly learn new fields and implement new ideas

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills and can work effectively on both research and engineering implementation at scale

Culture:

• Our research methodology is to make grounded, methodical steps toward ambitious goals. Both deep research and engineering excellence are equally valued

• We strongly value new and crazy ideas and are very willing to bet big on new ideas

• We move as quickly as we can; we aim to make the bar to impact as low as possible

• We all enjoy what we do and love discussing AI

Benefits and Perks:

• Medical, dental, vision and FSA plans

• Competitive salary, equity and 401(k)

• Relocation and immigration support on a case-by-case basis

• On-site meals prepared by dedicated culinary team; Thursday Happy Hours 

General requirements:

• Willing to be in-person in our office in Palo Alto

• US authorization to work. We will consider O1 visa sponsorship for the right candidate.