---
title: 'ML Engineer (Internship and Full-time) at Tilde Research'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ml-engineer-internship-and-full-time-tilde-research-san-francisco-zpzxrhy7xesc'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# ML Engineer (Internship and Full-time) at Tilde Research

- **Company:** Tilde Research
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-07-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tilderesearch/b2e145db-0111-47c1-9d9f-e856a057d8ef

## Job description

Tilde Research is a moonshot AI lab advancing mechanistic interpretability, new architectures, and pretraining science. We build foundational understanding of models to advance the frontier of intelligence.

About the role: As a ML Engineer, you’ll build and operate the infrastructure that makes cutting-edge machine learning research possible. At Tilde, we believe meaningful progress in AI requires not just novel ideas, but the ability to rapidly test, scale, and iterate on them—and that demands exceptional engineering. You’ll work on the systems that support training and evaluating large models, scaling experimental pipelines, and building the infrastructure necessary to actually understand models. Your work will be foundational to our research, making it possible to explore ambitious ideas that push the boundaries of performance, interpretability, and control.

What you might work on:

- Optimize inference and training throughput for novel model architectures
- Build and maintain high-performance distributed training infrastructure
- Collaborate with researchers to translate insights into measurable improvements in model performance and understanding

You're a good fit if you:

- Have experience in deep learning or related research areas
- Have demonstrated exceptional capability in working on ML infrastructure. This can include:
- Strong open source contributions
- Thoughtful technical blog posts/work logs
- Previous experience working with large-scale pre/post-training infrastructure
- Deep familarity with Pytorch or Jax, basic familiarity Triton/Tilelang/TK etc.
- Communicate clearly and effectively, both verbally and in writing
- Can design and orchestrate end-to-end ML pipelines
- Are able to learn quickly

## About Tilde Research

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Tilde Research is a moonshot AI lab advancing mechanistic interpretability, new architectures, and pretraining science.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage – $8M raised)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, CA, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Dhruv Pai (Co-Founder, Chief Science Officer) and Mason Wang (Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence research – technology, information, and internet.
- **Target customers**: Researchers and engineers in the AI/ML community (B2B/Developer‑facing); also seeks to push foundational research that benefits the broader field.
- **Mission / purpose**: “To deeply understand the inner mechanisms of models in order to advance the frontier of intelligence.” The lab believes mechanistic insights provide a guiding heuristic for better model design.

## Products & Services
The lab publishes open‑source research and tools, primarily on GitHub, including:
- **Aurora optimizer** – a new optimizer for training deep models.
- **NSA (Native Sparse Attention) kernel** – an efficient implementation of sparse attention.
- **MoMoE** – a memory‑optimized Mixture‑of‑Experts implementation for training frontier‑scale MoE models.
- **Wall‑Attention** – an attention variant with per‑channel multiplicative decay.
- **Activault** – an engine for collecting, uploading, and downloading model activations.
- **Sieve** – a tool for applying Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to achieve fine‑grained control over model behavior.

All products are released as open‑source research artifacts (code and kernels) aimed at advancing interpretability and efficiency.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private company).
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $8M in a seed round (early 2025).
- **Notable Investors**: Led by **Khosla Ventures**, with participation from **Forgepoint Capital**, **Soma Capital**, **Timeless**, and **Bain Capital Ventures**.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Employee headcount: 6 (up 225% YoY).
  - LinkedIn followers: ~974 (monthly growth +6.7%, yearly +309%).
  - Website traffic: ~11k monthly visits (yearly growth +87%).
  - Active open‑source repos with stars (e.g., Aurora optimizer 147 stars, NSA kernel 135 stars).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Specialized focus on mechanistic interpretability** – a niche that few labs pursue as a primary moonshot, giving Tilde a unique position between frontier model builders and pure research.
- **Open‑source philosophy** – builds community trust and adoption while accelerating the field; attracts top talent who value transparency.
- **Small, elite team** with strong academic + industry pedigree (MIT CSAIL, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Anthropic, Amazon).
- **Founders deeply embedded in the interpretability community** (Druv Pai has a strong publication record; Mason Wang brings engineering depth).

## Strategic Focus
- **Build foundational understanding** of model internals (SAEs, attention mechanisms, MoE routing).
- **Enable “control tech”** – interpreter models and tools that allow deep reasoning and command over AI systems.
- **Contribute to open‑source infrastructure** (kernels, optimizers) to shape how frontier models are trained and deployed.
- **Grow the team** – actively hiring ML researchers (internship and full‑time) to expand capacity.

## Why Work Here
- **Cutting‑edge research** – work on the hardest problems in AI interpretability and architecture design.
- **Small lab culture** (≈6 people) – high ownership, rapid iteration, direct impact on flagship projects.
- **Moonshot mentality** – not product‑driven, but driven by the pursuit of understanding; ideal for researchers who value fundamental science.
- **Strong network effects** – team members come from top institutions and labs; alumni go on to places like Nous Research, Forgepoint Capital, and Stanford.
- **Career development** – offers both internships and full‑time roles; the interview process includes a graph theory problem that showcases the lab’s intellectual rigor.
- **Location**: San Francisco (headquarters) – likely in‑person or hybrid given the small team size; specific remote policy is not publicly stated.

## Sources
1. [tilderesearch.com](https://tilderesearch.com/about)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/tilderesearch)
3. [github.com](https://github.com/tilde-research)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tilderesearch/e850d5b0-a5d6-4b9c-9898-f7addb441508)

## Other roles at Tilde Research

- [Kernel Engineer (Internship and Full-time)](https://feeny.ai/job/kernel-engineer-internship-and-full-time-tilde-research-san-francisco-w9dnhry0v771) — San Francisco, CA
- [ML Researcher (Internship and Full-time)](https://feeny.ai/job/ml-researcher-internship-and-full-time-tilde-research-san-francisco-h6065b7073t9) — San Francisco, CA