Research Engineer

Join Sakana AI as a Research Engineer to pioneer nature-inspired approaches to foundational AI development, moving beyond traditional dense architectures. You will contribute to our mission of creating small, efficient, and adaptive models through techniques like evolutionary optimization and neural architecture search. This role offers the unique opportunity to define the next generation of collective intelligence by developing models that learn and evolve like biological systems.

- Design and implement novel algorithms for model merging and evolutionary architecture discovery. - Develop scalable infrastructure to support the training of foundation models inspired by collective intelligence. - Conduct rigorous experiments to benchmark nature-inspired models against traditional LLM baselines. - Optimize model inference and training efficiency to enable high-performance deployment of "small but mighty" models. - Collaborate with the research team to draft whitepapers and patents on bio-inspired AI methodologies. - Maintain and improve our internal codebase for automated model evolution and weights manipulation. - Stay at the forefront of AI research to integrate emerging techniques in sparse activation and modularity.

- Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field with a focus on Deep Learning. - Proven track record of implementing and scaling Transformer-based architectures or foundation models. - Deep understanding of evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, or neuroevolutionary methods. - Proficiency in managing large-scale distributed training across GPU/TPU clusters. - Experience with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) and model merging techniques. - Strong publication record or portfolio of open-source contributions in the AI research space. - Ability to work autonomously in a globally distributed, remote-first research environment.