
Essential AI provides open models and developer tooling that make frontier AI research and deployment easier and more accessible. The company develops and releases open large language models (LLMs), reproducible training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and developer tooling powered by human feedback and iterative improvements. It operates as a B2B platform offering APIs, reproducible pipelines, and integrations for research labs, enterprise engineering teams, and domain partners. By combining open science with production-ready infrastructure and evaluation tooling, Essential AI aims to accelerate adoption of frontier capabilities across academia and industry.

Essential AI provides open models and developer tooling that make frontier AI research and deployment easier and more accessible. The company develops and releases open large language models (LLMs), reproducible training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and developer tooling powered by human feedback and iterative improvements. It operates as a B2B platform offering APIs, reproducible pipelines, and integrations for research labs, enterprise engineering teams, and domain partners. By combining open science with production-ready infrastructure and evaluation tooling, Essential AI aims to accelerate adoption of frontier capabilities across academia and industry.
What they do: Build open frontier large language models, reproducible training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and developer tooling
HQ: San Francisco, CA
Founders / leadership: Dr. Ashish Vaswani (CEO) and Niki Parmar (co‑founder)
Founded: 2023
Recent funding: Series A (Dec 2023), ~$56.5M reported; total reported funding ~$64.5M
Making frontier AI research, modeling, evaluation, and deployment more accessible and reproducible.
2023
Software Development
Seed round led by Thrive Capital (reported)
56500000
Series A reported at ~$56.5M with participation from Thrive Capital, NVIDIA, KB Investment, AMD, Franklin Venture Partners, Alphabet/Google, and others
“Participation from strategic investors in AI hardware and platforms (NVIDIA, AMD, Google/Alphabet) and VC firms (March Capital, Thrive Capital)”
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About Us We believe that a small, focused team of motivated individuals can create outsized breakthroughs. We are building an open platform to fuel and accelerate AI breakthroughs globally. Essential AI’s technology and products have the means to shape AI advancements while supporting scalable and sustainable business models.
The Role
The ML Infra Platform Engineer will be responsible for architecting and building the compute infra that powers the training and serving of our models. This requires a full understanding of the complete backend stack → from frameworks to compilers to runtimes to kernels.
Running and training models at scale often requires solving novel system problems. As an Infra Systems Engineer, you'll be responsible for identifying these problems and then developing systems that optimize the throughput and robustness of distributed systems. With proven experience building large-scale platforms, you will be responsible for building and advancing our systems that allow research and engineering organizations to iteratively develop, test, and deploy new features reliably, with high velocity, and with a frictionless-fast development cycle.
What You’ll Be Working On
What we are looking for
We encourage you to apply for this position even if you don’t check all of the above requirements but want to spend time pushing on these techniques.
Essential AI commits to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment, as well as equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. You may view all of Essential AI’s recruiting notices here, including our EEO policy, recruitment scam notice, and recruitment agency policy.