--- title: 'ML Researcher (Internship and Full-time) at Tilde Research' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ml-researcher-internship-and-full-time-tilde-research-san-francisco-h6065b7073t9' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-13' --- # ML Researcher (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/e850d5b0-a5d6-4b9c-9898-f7addb441508 ## 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 Researcher, you will develop innovative techniques to deeply understand how large AI models work—and use those insights to make them better. You'll work on training, analyzing, and evaluating cutting-edge models, collaborating closely with a team of researchers and engineers to advance interpretability as a tool for improving performance and control. What you might work on: - Designing, prototyping, and optimizing novel model architectures - Investigating why models or specific components behave the way they do—and how to improve them - Curating targeted datasets to elicit and instill specific behaviors or capabilities in models - Collaborating on papers, blog posts, and open-source tools to share insights with the broader community You're a good fit if you: - Have experience in deep learning or related research areas - Have deep technical expertise in some subfield(s) of modern ML, e.g. architecture, optimizers, RL, learning dynamics, etc.. This can include through: - Strong publication record - Thoughtful technical blog posts - Have experience working with large-scale pre/post-training infrastructure for experimentation - Communicate clearly and effectively, both verbally and in writing - Can come up with and evaluate research ideas - 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 Engineer (Internship and Full-time)](https://feeny.ai/job/ml-engineer-internship-and-full-time-tilde-research-san-francisco-zpzxrhy7xesc) — San Francisco, CA