Founding Research Engineer in the Flower Frontier Model Team (all seniority levels welcome) [UK, Germany, Global]

About the Role

(Preference given to candidates with post-training expertise. But any talented individual with a track record of exceptional drive and determination are encouraged to apply regardless of prior experience.)

As a founding Research Engineer in this new team, you will play a critical role in building SOTA LLMs and foundation models within a small, high-impact team composed of contributors that have a mix of both research and engineering backgrounds. This role will provide the opportunity to shape every part of the scientific foundation of our frontier models. You’ll be deeply hands-on, turning your best ideas into working systems and collaborating with the team to scale the approaches that prove most effective. The methods you develop will be used to produce world-leading models that are open-sourced and integrated into new Flower Lab products.

We expect you to bring to the team creativity, balanced against systematic experiments, and a keen awareness of the latest result from other AI labs. This will feed into how you design and implement techniques and run experiments across the spectrum of stages relevant to frontier model building: data curation, evals, pre-training, post-training. Everything is in scope for you as the team seeks to release its first series of models. Experience in these areas is obviously welcome, but a general expectation of problem solving, learning on the job and working collaboratively to efficiently combine the talents of the team is an explicit requirement for success. Familiarity in some mix of areas including the following will be necessary:

• Transformers and their variants
• Optimization approaches — incl. theory and trade-offs
• Large-scale training stability
• SFT, preference modeling, RL and evals

This is a foundational role for an ambitious technical effort. We are looking for a special talent that brings to the team a strong principled scientific approach coupled with a talent for prototyping and all kinds of implementations. We seek out those able assume technical leadership as the ambitions of our models scale in complexity and capability. More broadly, you can expect a collaborative, fast-paced and demanding start-up environment containing a team of experts in their respective fields, in which everyone still learns something new every day. You will have the opportunity to contribute ideas, be heard and influence the direction of the company across the board.