Prime Intellect

1 open Forward Deployed Engineer role at Prime Intellect, plus 1 closed. Curated with comp bands.

Comp on the board: $150K–$300K cash + equity.

On the board since Jul 2026 · latest role Oct 2026 · still hiring

Our take

Why Prime Intellect

The rare FDE seat where the deliverable is training itself — embed with AI labs to design their post-training and RL runs — at a company that just raised a $130M Series A at a $1B valuation.

FDE type: True forward-deployed
Travel: Medium
Comp: Competitive
Stage: Growth-stage

A good fit if you're…

Research engineers who want to ship training and RL, not just wire up inference
People fluent in RL environments, post-training pipelines, and evaluation harnesses
Candidates who want lab-facing work — AI companies and research labs as customers — over enterprise IT
Those comfortable with a wide, research-weighted comp band and San Francisco-based work

What Prime Intellect builds

Prime Intellect builds infrastructure for decentralized and large-scale AI training: a peer-to-peer compute exchange, the PRIME training framework, and PRIME-RL for distributed reinforcement learning. It has shipped a line of open models — INTELLECT-1 (10B, 2024), INTELLECT-2 (32B, 2025), and INTELLECT-3 (106B mixture-of-experts, Nov 2025). Founded January 2024 by Vincent Weißer and Johannes Hagemann, based in San Francisco.

The FDE seat where the deliverable is a training run

Unusually technical for forward-deployed work: the customer engagement is a training run, not a dashboard. You embed with AI labs and enterprises to translate their models and goals into concrete post-training runs, RL environment designs, evaluation harnesses, and deployment recipes on the Lab stack — then feed field insights back to research, product, and infra teams.

Lab-facing, not enterprise-IT

Named platform customers include Ramp and Zapier; Ramp's co-founder said a spreadsheet agent built on it 'beat the frontier models on accuracy while running at faster speeds and a fraction of the cost.' You're forward-deployed into a research loop, standing up RL environments and post-training pipelines — closer to the model than to the deployment surface most FDE roles touch.

Comp: a wide, research-weighted $150K–$300K band

The board lists $150K–$300K — a wide, research-weighted band spanning strong applied engineer to research-engineer leveling. That spread means Prime Intellect levels you on research chops, not tenure. The role is San Francisco with some remote flexibility. Equity is pre-IPO at a company just marked at $1B, so ask for the band and strike price early.

The $130M Series A and who's behind it

On July 8, 2026 Prime Intellect raised a $130M Series A at a $1B valuation, led by Radical Ventures with Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and Iconiq, plus angels including Aravind Srinivas, Aaron Levie, and Winston Weinberg — bringing total funding above $150M. An earlier $15M round (Feb 2025) was led by Founders Fund with Andrej Karpathy participating. Reported annualized revenue run rate: roughly $100M.

Who thrives, and who bounces

Thrives: research engineers fluent in RL and post-training who want customer-facing work at the training layer and are up for San Francisco on-site. Bounces: anyone wanting pure enterprise integration, a fully-remote seat, or a straight product-IC track — this role lives inside a lab's research loop.

Questions candidates ask

Is this a research role or an FDE role?

Both. It's forward-deployed, but the deliverable is a training run — post-training, RL environments, eval harnesses — so the bar is research-engineer, not integration-consultant.

Who are the customers?

AI companies, research labs, and enterprises running post-training and agentic RL on the platform; named customers include Ramp and Zapier.

Is it remote?

San Francisco with some remote flexibility.

How well-funded is it?

A $130M Series A (July 2026) at a $1B valuation led by Radical Ventures brings total funding above $150M; an earlier round was led by Founders Fund with Andrej Karpathy participating.

Analysis updated 2026-09-23

Open roles at Prime Intellect

Prime Intellect

Applied Research - Forward-Deployed RL

new$150K–$300K cash + equity

A forward-deployed role where the deliverable is a post-trained model, not an integration: you build the RL environment, run the experiments, and ship what works. The $150K–$300K band and a London/remote option make it one of the few research-grade FDE seats open outside SF.

San Francisco / New York / London / Remotefrontier-labreinforcement learningresearch-FDEremote ok

Prime Intellect

Applied Research — Forward-Deployed

closed$150K–$300K

The rare FDE seat where the deliverable isn't inference but training itself — embed with AI labs and enterprises to design their post-training runs, RL environments, and eval harnesses on Prime Intellect's Lab stack. Backed by Founders Fund with Andrej Karpathy angel'd in; the $150K floor-to-$300K ceiling spread means they'll level you on research chops, not tenure.

San Franciscodecentralized AIpost-training / RLfounders fund + karpathy

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