Research Scientist, Performance Engineering

The Biological Computing
The Biological Computing

San Francisco, CA, USA

Posted on Jul 13, 2026

TBC is building next-generation AI systems at the intersection of biological computing, generative models, and large-scale AI infrastructure. As we scale our world-model and neural-optimizer efforts, we are looking for an optimization-focused Research Scientist / ML Engineer to improve the efficiency, latency, throughput, and deployability of large models.

This role is focused on making frontier models run faster, cheaper, and more reliably — especially LLMs, diffusion models, video generation models, and world-model systems. You will work across inference optimization, training efficiency, model compression, memory management, and GPU-level performance to help turn research systems into scalable, customer-ready products.

What You’ll Work On

  • Optimize inference for LLMs, diffusion models, video models, and world-model systems

  • Improve serving efficiency through techniques such as KV caching, batching, quantization, distillation, speculative decoding, and memory optimization

  • Build and optimize high-throughput inference pipelines for large models running on GPU clusters

  • Profile model performance across latency, throughput, memory usage, GPU utilization, and cost

  • Implement custom kernels or low-level optimizations using Triton, CUDA, PyTorch, or related systems

  • Improve training and fine-tuning efficiency for large generative models, including distributed training, checkpointing, parallelism, and data loading

  • Work with research teams to identify bottlenecks in model architecture, inference paths, and deployment workflows

  • Translate model performance improvements into clear customer-facing benchmarks and technical proof points

  • Evaluate trade-offs across model quality, latency, cost, memory, and deployability

What We’re Looking For

  • Strong background in machine learning systems, model optimization, or high-performance AI infrastructure

  • Hands-on experience optimizing LLMs, diffusion models, video generation models, or other large generative systems

  • Experience with one or more of:

    • Inference optimization

    • KV caching / attention optimization

    • Triton or CUDA kernel development

    • Quantization, pruning, distillation, or model compression

    • Distributed training / fine-tuning efficiency

    • GPU profiling and performance debugging

  • Strong PyTorch experience and comfort working close to the model/runtime boundary

  • Ability to reason about trade-offs between quality, latency, throughput, memory, and cost

  • Comfortable working across research code, production systems, and benchmarking infrastructure

  • Excited to work in an ambiguous, early-stage environment where optimization work directly shapes product feasibility

What Success Looks Like

  • Large models run faster, cheaper, and more reliably across TBC’s core workloads

  • Inference pipelines show measurable improvements in latency, throughput, memory use, and GPU utilization

  • Training and fine-tuning workflows become more efficient, reproducible, and scalable

  • Optimization work translates into clear product and customer value, not just internal benchmarks

  • Research prototypes become deployable systems that can support demos, evaluations, and early partner use cases

Preferred Qualifications

  • PhD, MS, or equivalent industry experience in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Systems, Robotics, or related field

  • Prior work optimizing large-scale generative models in production or research settings

  • Experience with modern inference/training stacks such as PyTorch, Triton, CUDA, vLLM, TensorRT, DeepSpeed, FSDP, Ray, or similar tooling

  • Experience working with LLMs, diffusion models, video generation models, or world models