AI/ML Engineer
Lightning Rod Labs
Full-time
New York, NY, USA · Remote
Posted on Oct 7, 2025
About Us
*Lightning Rod Labs trains AI to predict the future.*
We train LLMs to predict real-world outcomes with scalable self-play on unstructured data. We make it easy for enterprises to train custom models from messy data, no extraction required.
We’ve demonstrated that small models (14B & 32B) trained with our method can outperform frontier models on prediction‑market benchmarks using generated data—with no human bottlenecks.
Messy data in; accurate predictions out.
What You’ll Do
You’ll build cutting-edge systems that teach AI real‑world reasoning, at scale.
- The worlds first platform for Prediction Agents. Create and evolve infrastructure for training and serving prediction agents.
- Scale. Orchestrate distributed training and inference on large multi-node GPU clusters.
- Transform messy data. Convert unstructured streams into training signals suitable for learning and evaluation.
- Learn causes, not just correlations. Design novel objectives, rewards, and calibration methods so models learn causal factors and output well‑calibrated probabilities.
- Experiment relentlessly. Optimize our training framework, tune specific models, and demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art results on benchmarks.
- Own delivery end‑to‑end. Ship from data collection to deployment.
What We Expect from You
- Excellent python chops & experience fine-tuning LLMs.
- Track record of shipping impactful systems.
- Ownership mindset and comfort operating with autonomy.
- Proof of skill — GitHub, portfolio, papers, or demos.
- Scale experience: you’ve worked beyond toy setups—millions of samples and large, distributed GPU clusters.
- Technical range: rapid analysis in a notebook to robust, scalable data and training pipelines.
- Tooling: Verl, Hugging Face, PyTorch, pandas, and standard training/data tooling.
- Data intuition: strong grasp of statistics, probability, data hygiene, and machine‑learning best practices.
- Cloud fluency: Comfortable across cloud platforms. We work with Modal, GCP, Azure, and AWS just to name a few.
What You’ll Get Out of It
- Cutting edge, for real. Help advance a new way to train LLMs for prediction from unstructured data using RL and self‑play, and build a framework that can eventually teach AI things humans don’t know.
- Meaningful impact. Work on critical use cases like defense, healthcare, and major institutions.
- Product ownership. Own major pieces of our stack—from design to shipped systems.
- Speed & autonomy. High‑trust, fast‑paced environment where you set direction, ship often, and see rapid real‑world impact.
- Tight‑knit team & company‑wide collaboration. Work closely with a small team and partner across the whole startup (product, engineering, and customer teams) to carry work from research to real‑world impact.
Location
Remote-first with a growing hub in Brooklyn / NYC (preferred); meaningful overlap with Eastern Time is required.
How to Apply
Email ops@lightningrod.ai
Lightning Rod Labs is an equal opportunity employer.