"Research Software Engineer II"

Overview

The Princeton Language and Intelligence Initiative at Princeton University invites applications for a Research Software Engineer (RSE) position. This multidisciplinary initiative has two Research thrusts: (a) Better design, evaluation, safety, and understanding of large AI models (especially language models) and (b) Studying the impact of large AI models on society and the world. The Initiative will produce open-source software and models.

The term of this appointment is 3 years, with the possibility of renewal based upon satisfactory performance and funding.

The position is based in Princeton, NJ. This is not a remote position.

Additional Information

• Competitive compensation package with attractive work conditions.
• Access to state-of-the-art research facilities and GPU cluster.
• Opportunities for professional growth and career advancement.
• Collaborative and inclusive work environment that fosters creativity and innovation.

If you are passionate about advancing AI research, working alongside leading researchers, and contributing to impactful open-source projects, we encourage you to apply for this position. Applications will be accepted until all positions are filled.

Responsibilities

Job responsibilities will include a subset of the following, depending upon the individual’s background:

• Collaborate with our diverse team to help develop and improve large AI models, helping conduct experiments, analyze results, and co-author research publications.
• Develop, maintain, and improve our shared infrastructure for training/fine-tuning and prompting large AI models.
• Maintain software libraries/environment/Github repositories and support model use.
• Provide support for the use of these libraries within the core AI models group and for interdisciplinary work. This includes documenting projects in a descriptive, appropriately detailed manner that is understandable to both researchers and future Research Engineers.
• Serve as liaisons with Princeton High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) staff on GPU cluster-related issues.

We prioritize professional development for RSEs and offer the following opportunities:

• Learning the underlying science, mathematics, statistics, data analysis, and algorithms of computational research questions. This may involve conducting independent research, studying existing codebases, and staying up to date with publications.
• Building awareness of software development tools, techniques, software engineering best practices, programming languages, high-performance computing hardware, and computational research solutions.
• Access to a community of about two dozen research software engineers, as well as continued professional development opportunities at Princeton Research Computing.

Qualifications

• A minimum of 5 years as a Research Software Engineer or equivalent experience (e.g., graduate school, industry experience, open-source software development, etc.)
• A Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, sciences, or a related computational field is required.
• Solid coding skills and good experience with large AI models.
• Familiarity with GPU computing environments and ML frameworks and libraries (e.g., DeepSpeed, HuggingFace).
• Prior research experience in AI/ML and/or contributions to open-source libraries.
• Strong written and oral technical communication skills.

Additional Details

• Department: Research Computing
• Job Type: Full-Time
• Standard Weekly Hours: 36.25
• Eligible for Overtime: No
• Benefits Eligible: Yes
• Experience Level: Mid-Senior Level
• Salary Range: $125,000 to $140,000