About A1
A1 is a self-funded, independent AI group, focused on building a new consumer AI application with global impact. We're assembling a small, elite team of ML, engineering and product builders who want to work on meaningful, high-impact problems.
About The Role
You will shape the core technical direction of A1 - model selection, training strategy, infrastructure, and long-term architecture. This is a founding technical role: your decisions will define our model stack, our data strategy, and our product capabilities for years ahead.
You won't just fine-tune models - you'll design systems: training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, inference stacks, and scalable deployment architectures. You will have full autonomy to experiment with frontier models (LLaMA, Mistral, Qwen, Claude-compatible architectures) and build new approaches where existing ones fall short.
What You'll Be Doing
* Build end-to-end training pipelines: data → training → eval → inference
* Design new model architectures or adapt open-source frontier models
* Fine-tune models using state-of-the-art methods (LoRA/QLoRA, SFT, DPO, distillation)
* Architect scalable inference systems using vLLM / TensorRT-LLM / DeepSpeed
* Build data systems for high-quality synthetic and real-world training data
* Develop alignment, safety, and guardrail strategies
* Design evaluation frameworks across performance, robustness, safety, and bias
* Own deployment: GPU optimization, latency reduction, scaling policies
* Shape early product direction, experiment with new use cases, and build AI-powered experiences from zero
* Explore frontier techniques: retrieval-augmented training, mixture-of-experts, distillation, multi-agent orchestration, multimodal models
What You'll Need
* Strong background in deep learning and transformer architectures
* Hands-on experience training or fine-tuning large models (LLMs or vision models)
* Proficiency with PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow
* Experience with distributed training frameworks (DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron, ZeRO, Ray)
* Strong software engineering skills — writing robust, production-grade systems
* Experience with GPU optimization: memory efficiency, quantization, mixed precision
* Comfortable owning ambiguous, zero-to-one technical problems end-to-end
Nice to Have
* Experience with LLM inference frameworks (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, FasterTransformer)
* Contributions to open-source ML libraries
* Background in scientific computing, compilers, or GPU kernels
* Experience with RLHF pipelines (PPO, DPO, ORPO)
* Experience training or deploying multimodal or diffusion models
* Experience in large-scale data processing (Apache Arrow, Spark, Ray)
* Prior work in a research lab (Google Brain, DeepMind, FAIR, Anthropic, OpenAI)
Our Team & Culture
We operate as a dense, senior, high-performance team. We value clarity, speed, craftsmanship, and relentless ownership. We behave like founders — we build, ship, iterate, and hold ourselves to a high technical bar.
If you value excellence, enjoy building real systems, and want to be part of a small team creating something globally impactful, you'll thrive here.