
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 Essential AI is building an open platform to fuel and accelerate AI breakthroughs globally. Our open models, robust tooling, reproducible pipelines, and evaluation frameworks are designed for collaboration and contribution, empowering others to build, iterate, and innovate faster.
Essential AI's technology and products have the means to shape AI advancements while supporting scalable and sustainable business models. Powerful AIs don't trace their origins to singular breakthroughs, but from an amalgam of improvements, incremental and large. Essential AI creates the ideal environment to catalyze these advancements, enabling a steady path to sustained frontier capabilities.
The Role
The Research Engineer, Pre-Training will be responsible for designing and implementing novel pre-training approaches to create powerful foundation models that can be fine-tuned/further aligned for a variety of downstream tasks. You will work closely with various pre-training research teams to identify key challenges and opportunities, and then develop and test new pre-training techniques and architectures. This may involve exploring different model architectures, training objectives, data sources, and scaling approaches. You will also be responsible for running large-scale experiments, analyzing results, and iterating on your approaches.
What You’ll Be Working On
What We Are Looking For
We are based in-person in SF and work fully onsite 5 days a week. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.
The base pay range for the role described in this job description is $225,000 to $250,000 based on experience for our location in San Francisco, CA. Final offer amounts depend on various job-related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews and our benchmarks against market compensation data. In addition to cash pay, full-time regular positions are eligible for equity, 401(k), health benefits, monthly wellness & education stipend, and other benefits like daily onsite lunches and snacks; some of these benefits may be available for part-time or temporary positions. 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.