Research Engineer - Pretraining Data
Quick facts
- Pay
- $150-350k, including equity incentives
- Type
- Full-time
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Skills
- Python
- Industry
- Information Technology — 671 open jobs
- Apply
- Free to apply — never pay anyone for a job offer or visa sponsorship
Job description
Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team.
Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own.
Prime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators, including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more. We are looking for people who want to build at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a category that does not fully exist yet.
Role Impact
Build the data behind Prime Intellect’s next generation of open models. You’ll find valuable sources, turn them into training-ready corpora, and work with researchers to test what actually improves the model. Your work will shape both broad pretraining and the data used to develop reasoning, coding, and long-context capabilities.
Responsibilities
- Find, evaluate, and collect valuable training data from web, code, and technical sources.
- Build scalable pipelines that turn raw data into training-ready corpora through extraction, cleaning, deduplication, and filtering.
- Develop checks for data quality, coverage, and contamination, and use them to improve collection and processing.
- Work with researchers on data mixtures and sampling strategies for pretraining and midtraining.
- Prepare and evaluate data for long-context learning, reasoning, and coding, testing synthetic data where it proves useful.
- Run controlled data experiments and use model evaluations to decide which sources, mixtures, and processing choices are worth scaling.
- Make large-scale data processing efficient, reproducible, and recoverable, with clear source provenance and dataset versioning.
Requirements
- Strong programming skills in Python and a record of building reliable data-processing or distributed systems.
- Experience working with large datasets and managing the practical tradeoffs of storage, compute, throughput, and reproducibility.
- Ability to diagnose data-quality issues and translate research goals into measurable checks and experiments.
- Comfort owning an evolving technical problem end to end and working closely with researchers to test assumptions and improve the system.
Relevant experience may include:
- Web crawling, document extraction, code-data collection, or large-scale corpus curation.
- Deduplication, text classification, quality scoring, synthetic data, or training-data contamination analysis.
- Data-mixture experiments, curriculum learning, or measuring how dataset changes affect model performance.
Nice to have
- Experience preparing datasets for language-model pretraining, continued pretraining, or midtraining.
- Work with distributed processing frameworks such as Spark, Ray, or comparable systems.
- Experience with multilingual, mathematical, scientific, or repository-level code data.
- Familiarity with tokenization, training data loaders, and the needs of large model-training runs.
Depth in data acquisition, scalable processing, or data research can be a strong starting point. We don’t expect every candidate to have worked across all of them.
Benefits And Perks
- Cash Compensation Range of $150-350k, including equity incentives, aligning your success with the growth and impact of Prime Intellect.
- Flexible work arrangements, with the option to work remotely or in-person at our offices in San Francisco.
- Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance for international candidates.
- Quarterly team off-sites, hackathons, conferences and learning opportunities.
- Opportunity to work with a talented, hard-working and mission-driven team, united by a shared passion for leveraging technology to accelerate science and AI.
If you're excited about the opportunity to build the foundation for the future of decentralized AI and create a platform that empowers developers and researchers to push the boundaries of what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.
Visa sponsorship record: Prime Intellect, Inc.
Sponsors occasionally| Fiscal year | H-1B LCAs | USCIS approvals | USCIS denials | PERM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | 3 | 1 | 0 | — |
This exact kind of role (Engineers, All Other) isn't among the roles Prime Intellect, Inc. sponsored most often.
Roles they sponsor most
- member of technical gpu infrastructure2 LCAs · median $142k
- applied researcher1 LCA · median $195k
Which visas can work for this job
Occupation: Engineers, All Other (SOC 17-2199) — estimated from the job title.
- H-1B cap-exempt employer
Regular cap-subject employer — a new H-1B needs to win the lottery in March (unless you already hold cap-counted H-1B status).
- TN (citizens of Canada and Mexico)
This kind of role may fit the USMCA profession “Engineer” — it depends on the actual duties. No lottery, no cap; you need the matching degree or license.
- E-3 (Australia) and H-1B1 (Chile, Singapore)
Same degree requirement as H-1B, but no lottery and a separate quota that is rarely filled.
- O-1 (extraordinary ability)
For candidates with awards, publications, press, a high salary or critical roles at distinguished organizations. No cap, no lottery; the employer files a petition.
- STEM OPT extension (F-1 students)
Requires an E-Verify employer. We didn't find this company in the E-Verify list — ask HR.
Salary vs prevailing wage
Engineers, All Other · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Annual prevailing wages set by the Department of Labor (OFLC).
| Level | Prevailing wage | H-1B lottery odds* |
|---|---|---|
| Level I | $98,051 | ~15% |
| Level II | $130,146 | ~31% |
| Level III | $162,261 | ~46% |
| Level IV | $194,355 | ~61% |
The listing has no salary, so we can't place it on a wage level. Ask the employer which wage level they'd file at: Level III–IV registrations get 3–4 entries in the H-1B lottery.
* Odds are DHS projections for the FY2027 wage-weighted lottery (actual results vary by year and employer). Since the FY2027 cap season the H-1B lottery is weighted by wage level: Level I = 1 entry, II = 2, III = 3, IV = 4. The level is set by the offered wage against the prevailing wage for the occupation and worksite. Separately, a $100,000 fee for new H-1B petitions for workers outside the US was announced in 2025; as of September 2026 a federal court ruling keeps it unenforceable while appeals continue — check the current status.
Sources: U.S. Department of Labor OFLC disclosure data (H-1B/H-1B1/E-3 LCA, PERM), OFLC prevailing wage data, USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub, E-Verify participating employers. Data loaded: LCA FY2024–FY2026, PERM, USCIS Data Hub, OFLC wages; updated 2026-10-03. Employers are matched by name, so records of companies with similar names can occasionally be mixed up. This is general information, not legal advice — talk to an immigration attorney about your case.