Magic’s mission is to build safe AGI that accelerates humanity’s progress on the world’s most important problems. We believe the most promising path to safe AGI lies in automating research and code generation to improve models and solve alignment more reliably than humans can alone. Our approach combines frontier-scale pre-training, domain-specific RL, ultra-long context, and inference-time compute to achieve this goal.
About the role
As a Research Engineer on the Pre-training Systems team, you will design and operate the distributed infrastructure that trains Magic’s long-context models at scale.
This role focuses on large-scale model training across massive GPU clusters. You will work at the boundary between deep learning and distributed systems, ensuring that training runs are performant, reliable, and reproducible under extreme scale.
Magic’s long-context models create non-trivial systems challenges: sustained memory pressure, communication overhead across thousands of devices, long-running jobs that must survive failures, and efficient sequence packing under hardware constraints. You will own the systems that make large-scale pre-training stable and fast.
What you’ll work on
Scale distributed training across large GPU clusters (data, tensor, pipeline parallelism)
Optimize communication patterns and gradient synchronization
Improve checkpointing, fault tolerance, and job recovery systems
Profile and eliminate performance bottlenecks across compute, networking, and storage
Improve experiment reproducibility and orchestration workflows
Increase hardware utilization and training throughput
Collaborate with Kernels and Research to align model architecture with systems realities
What we’re looking for
Strong software engineering and distributed systems fundamentals
Experience training large models in multi-node GPU environments
Deep understanding of parallelism strategies and performance trade-offs
Experience debugging cross-layer issues in production ML systems
Strong ownership mindset and ability to operate critical infrastructure
Track record of improving performance or reliability of large-scale systems
Our culture
Integrity. Words and actions should be aligned
Hands-on. At Magic, everyone is building
Teamwork. We move as one team, not N individuals
Focus. Safely deploy AGI. Everything else is noise
Quality. Magic should feel like magic
Magic strives to be the place where high-potential individuals can do their best work. We value quick learning and grit just as much as skill and experience.
Compensation, benefits, and perks (US):
Annual salary range: $275K - $550K
Equity is a significant part of total compensation, in addition to salary
401(k) plan with 6% salary matching
Generous health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents
Unlimited paid time off
Visa sponsorship and relocation stipend to bring you to SF, if possible
A small, fast-paced, highly focused team