Staff Research Engineer (LLM Pre-Training)

About the Role

JetBrains is seeking a Staff Research Engineer to contribute to the development of Large Language Models for coding assistance. You will work on training foundation models from scratch and deploying them into production environments accessible to users globally. This role sits within an ambitious platform initiative bringing AI capabilities across all JetBrains products.

Key Responsibilities

• Train Large Language Models from scratch using a large GPU cluster

• Collect and process pre-training and fine-tuning datasets

• Convert business requirements into technical specifications in collaboration with stakeholders

• Support and improve existing machine learning subsystems

• Plan projects and make technical decisions independently, with consultation as needed

Required Qualifications

• Production experience designing, deploying, and supporting ML systems

• Strong theoretical background in NLP and transformer-based approaches

• Proficiency with PyTorch and modern deep learning frameworks

• Experience training multi-billion parameter models in distributed settings

• Excellent attention to detail and communication skills

Preferred Experience

• LLM inference frameworks (vLLM, DeepSpeed, TensorRT)

• LLM alignment techniques (RLHF/RLAIF)

• MLOps tools and CI/CD practices for ML

• Kubernetes and Kubeflow

• Published research in NLP