poolside is hiring for a

Member of Engineering, Reinforcement Learning

Position: Full-time, indefinite contract

Location: Remote EMEA/East Coast or Paris

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About poolside

In this decade, the world will create artificial intelligence that reaches human level intelligence (and beyond) by combining learning and search. There will only be a small number of companies who will achieve this. Their ability to stack advantages and pull ahead will determine who survives and wins. These companies will move faster than anyone else. They will attract the world's most capable talent. They will be on the forefront of applied research and engineering at scale. They will create powerful economic engines. They will continue to scale their training to larger & more capable models. They will be given the right to raise large amounts of capital along their journey to enable this.

poolside exists to be one of these companies - to build a world where AI will drive the majority of economically valuable work and scientific progress.

We believe that software development will be the first major capability in neural networks that reaches human-level intelligence because it's the domain where we can combine Search and Learning approaches the best.

At poolside we believe our applied research needs to culminate in products that are put in the hands of people. Today we focus on building for a developer-led increasingly AI-assisted world. We believe that current capabilities of AI lead to incredible tooling that can assist developers in their day to day work. We also believe that as we increase the capabilities of our models, we increasingly empower anyone in the world to be able to build software. We envision a future where not 100 million people can build software but 2 billion people can.

About our team

We are a remote-first team that sits across Europe and North America and comes together once a month in-person for 3 days and for longer offsites twice a year.

Our R&D and production teams are a combination of more research and more engineering-oriented profiles, however, everyone deeply cares about the quality of the systems we build and has a strong underlying knowledge of software development. We believe that good engineering leads to faster development iterations, which allows us to compound our efforts.

About the role

You would be working on our reinforcement learning team focused on improving reasoning and coding abilities of Large Language Models through reinforcement learning. This is a hands-on role where you'll work end-to-end from researching new exploration or training algorithms, to designing and scaling up RL environments, to implementing your ideas across the stack. You will have access to thousands of GPUs in this team.

Your mission

To push the frontier of reasoning and coding capabilities of foundational models.

Responsibilities

Research and experiment on ways to improve reasoning and code generation for LLMs. Own the full experiment life cycle from idea to experimentation and integration.
Keep up with latest research, and be familiar with state of the art in LLMs, RL, and code generation.
Design, analyze, and iterate on training/fine-tuning/data generation experiments.
Write high-quality, pragmatic code.
Work in the team: plan future steps, discuss, and always stay in touch.

Skills & Experience

Experience with Large Language Models (LLM)

Deep knowledge of Transformers is a must
Strong deep learning fundamentals
Trained and fine-tuned LLMs from scratch
Extensively used and probed LLMs, familiarity of their capabilities and limitations
Knowledge/Experience of distributed training

Strong machine learning and engineering background
Research experience

Experience in proposing and evaluating novel research ideas
Familiar with, or contributed to the state of the art in at least one of the topics: LLMs, reinforcement learning, source code generation, continual learning
Is comfortable in a rapidly iterating environment
Is reasonably opinionated
Recent academic publications are nice to have

Programming experience

Linux
Strong algorithmic skills
Python with PyTorch or Jax
Use modern tools and are always looking to improve
Strong critical thinking and ability to question code quality policies when applicable
Prior experience in non-ML programming, especially not in Python - is a nice to have