Member of Technical Staff, Research ($120k-$300k + Equity) at The Token Company

The Token Company is a $12M seed-stage San Francisco startup backed by First Round Capital, NEA, and Y Combinator building ML models that compress raw LLM context.

About the role

You will own the model training stack end-to-end, designing and training compression models from scratch on NVIDIA B200s. Moving beyond simple RAG or prompt engineering, you will solve deep research problems in mechanistic interpretability and data generation to identify which information truly matters to an LLM, delivering immediate cost and latency improvements for production users.

Responsibilities

• Design and train novel transformer architectures from scratch on NVIDIA B200 clusters to compress context while preserving downstream model answerability.
• Build and own the entire training pipeline, including synthetic data generation, post-training, evaluation design, and shipping models into production.
• Analyze mechanistic interpretability and routing strategies to ensure compressed contexts generalize across domains without degrading downstream LLM performance or quality.

Requirements

• Deep experience pretraining or performing significant post-training on transformer models, moving beyond basic fine-tuning or calling external model APIs.
• Strong ML fundamentals with the ability to translate research papers into high-performance training runs and novel architectural implementations from scratch.
• A production-first mindset that prioritizes shipping models that solve real-world economic constraints over purely academic publication goals or static evals.

Why this role is remarkable

• Work on a high-leverage research problem—context compression—with a direct feedback loop from real production usage and high-growth scale-up customers.
• Exceptional backing with $12M from First Round, NEA, and the founders of Hugging Face, OpenAI, and xAI, providing massive resources and runway.
• Live and work in San Francisco with a unique support package including housing, food, laundry, and visa sponsorship, allowing total focus on research.

Pay

$120k–$300k + Equity

Location

San Francisco, USA