Data Scientist
Sciforium
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
Hybrid
Department
Engineering
Compensation
- $190K – $275K
Sciforium is an AI infrastructure company developing next-generation multimodal AI models and a proprietary, high-efficiency serving platform. Backed by multi-million-dollar funding and direct sponsorship from AMD with hands-on support from AMD engineers the team is scaling rapidly to build the full stack powering frontier AI models and real-time applications.
About the role
Sciforium is seeking a highly analytical and systems-aware Data Scientist to design, develop, and refine the next-generation AI models that leverage our large-scale compute clusters. In this role, you will bridge the gap between theoretical research and production-grade performance. You will not only build state-of-the-art LLMs and generative models but also ensure they are architecturally optimized for distributed training environments.
This position is ideal for a scientist who thinks deeply about algorithmic efficiency, convergence stability, and how model architecture impacts hardware utilization. You will play a pivotal role in defining the intelligence that powers Sciforium’s core offerings.
What you'll do
Model Architecture Design: Develop and experiment with novel architectures for LLMs and generative AI, focusing on maximizing performance-per-watt and training throughput.
Large-Scale Training Execution: Lead the end-to-end training runs of foundation models, monitoring loss curves, stability, and convergence across massive multi-node clusters.
Optimization & Scaling Laws: Apply scaling laws to predict model performance and optimize hyperparameters, tokenization strategies, and objective functions for trillion-parameter regimes.
Data Engineering & Curation: Build and maintain sophisticated data pipelines that handle petabyte-scale pre-training datasets, ensuring high-quality signal through advanced filtering and deduplication.
Algorithmic Profiling: Collaborate with the Training Engineering team to profile how specific model layers (e.g., Attention mechanisms, MoE layers) interact with GPU/accelerator memory and interconnects.
Evaluation & Benchmarking: Design robust evaluation frameworks to measure model capability across reasoning, coding, and creative tasks, ensuring alignment with safety and performance standards.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Infrastructure and Kernel engineers to co-design features that improve training efficiency and model FLOPs utilization (MFU).
Ideal candidate profile
5+ years of industry experience in Data Science, Machine Learning Research, or a closely related field, with a strong emphasis on deep learning.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or another quantitative discipline.
Expert-level Python skills with deep proficiency in PyTorch or JAX.
Demonstrated experience training and deploying large-scale models (e.g., LLMs, diffusion models) in distributed production environments.
Deep understanding of distributed training paradigms, including data parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and tensor parallelism.
Strong mathematical foundation in linear algebra, calculus, and optimization, particularly as applied to neural network training and convergence.
Experience working with data-at-scale tooling, such as Spark, Ray, or high-throughput data loading frameworks.
Nice-to-have
PhD in a relevant field, with publications at top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR).
Hands-on experience with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures, including routing and load-balancing challenges.
Familiarity with RLHF workflows, including PPO and DPO fine-tuning pipelines.
Knowledge of model quantization techniques (e.g., FP8, INT8, AWQ) and their impact on training stability and inference performance.
Contributions to open-source ML libraries or involvement in high-profile LLM releases.
Benefits include
Medical, dental, and vision insurance
401k plan
Daily lunch, snacks, and beverages
Flexible time off
Competitive salary and equity
Equal opportunity
Sciforium is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.
Compensation Range: $190K - $275K
