Base Labs Research Scientist

Job summary

Responsibilities

This role sits at the frontier of our research agenda. You will pursue open problems at the intersection of post-training methodology and performant inference, and then collaborate with research engineering to translate findings into production systems.

• Define and pursue a research agenda spanning both foundational and applied work, with the applied component connected to Baseten's platform and customer needs.
• Design and execute rigorous experiments, frequently at meaningful scale (multi-node, trillion parameter models).
• Work with customers to translate domain-specific requirements into research problems, where relevant to your agenda.
• Publish at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) and establish Baseten's research presence.
• Collaborate with model performance and training infrastructure teams to bridge research findings and inference production systems.

What they're looking for

• Master’s or PhD research depth in machine learning, with first-author publications at top venues
• Demonstrated ability to move from theory through implementation to empirical results — not exclusively theoretical or exclusively engineering work
• Judgment about problem selection, the ability to distinguish research that advances a metric from research that changes how systems are built
• Willingness to operate in a startup environment where the majority of research informs product decisions, with timelines measured in months rather than years
• Background spanning multiple research areas (e.g., both interpretability and RL, or both systems and training methodology)

Tech stack

• Spark