Apply on company website Melbourne, Australia On-site Full-time

Pluralis Research is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer - Distributed ML Systems

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement large-scale distributed training systems optimized for heterogeneous hardware operating under low-bandwidth, high-latency conditions.
  • Develop and optimize model-parallel training strategies (data, tensor, pipeline parallelism) with custom sharding techniques that minimize communication overhead.
  • Optimize GPU utilization, memory efficiency, and compute performance across distributed nodes.
  • Implement robust checkpointing, state synchronization, and recovery mechanisms for long-running, fault-prone training jobs.
  • Build monitoring and metrics systems to track training progress, model quality, and system bottlenecks.
  • Architect resilient training systems where nodes can fail, networks can partition, and participants can dynamically join or leave.
  • Design and optimize peer-to-peer topologies for decentralized coordination across non-co-located nodes.
  • Implement NAT traversal, peer discovery, dynamic routing, and connection lifecycle management.
  • Profile and optimize communication patterns to reduce latency and bandwidth overhead in multi-participant environments.

Requirements

  • Strong experience building and operating distributed systems in production.
  • Hands-on expertise with distributed training frameworks (FSDP, DeepSpeed, Megatron, or similar).
  • Deep understanding of model parallelism (data, tensor, pipeline parallelism).
  • Expert-level Python with production experience (concurrency, error handling, retry logic, clean architecture).
  • Strong networking fundamentals: P2P systems, gRPC, routing, NAT traversal, distributed coordination.
  • Experience optimizing GPU workloads, memory management, and large-scale compute efficiency.

Benefits

  • Equity-heavy compensation with meaningful ownership in a mission-driven company
  • Competitive base salary for senior engineering roles in Australia
  • Visa sponsorship available for exceptional candidates
  • Remote-first with optional access to our Melbourne hub
  • World-class team — team mates were previously at at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and leading startups

Additional Information

  • Pluralis is unapologetically ideological. We view the world as a better place if we are able to implement what we are attempting, and Protocol Learning as the only plausible approach to preventing a handful of massive corporations monopolising model development, access and release, and achieving massive economic capture.
Job Details
Location Melbourne, Australia
Work mode On-site
Employment Full-time
Department Engineering
Category Data & ML
Posted 6 months ago
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About company
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Pluralis Research is pioneering Protocol Learning — a fully decentralized way to train and deploy AI models that enables individuals, not just well-resourced corporations, to participate. By pooling compute from many participants, incentivizing contributions, and preventing any single party from controlling a model's full weights, the company is building an open, collaborative path to frontier-scale AI.
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