Research Engineer, AI (New Grad)

About This Role

Meta is hiring Research Engineers from campus to support its FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) and applied AI teams. You will implement research ideas, build training infrastructure, and help bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and Meta's product systems.

Job Overview

• Job Title: Research Engineer, AI (New Grad)
• Company: Meta
• Location: Menlo Park, CA / New York, NY / Seattle, WA / Pittsburgh, PA / Austin, TX
• Job Type: Full-time
• Experience Level: Entry-level (0–2 years)
• Salary Range: $44–$60/hr
• Posted Date: 2026-06-01
• Application Deadline: 2026-07-01

Role Context

Meta's new grad bootcamp rotates you across teams before you settle into a research engineering role. Research Engineers are the implementation backbone of AI research — you write the code that turns paper ideas into reproducible, scalable experiments. You will collaborate daily with research scientists on LLM pretraining, multimodal models, and AI safety work.

Key Responsibilities

• Implement and optimize ML model architectures for research experiments at scale
• Build high-performance training pipelines using PyTorch on GPU clusters
• Profile and debug training bottlenecks in large distributed training runs
• Collaborate with researchers to iterate on model design and evaluation protocols
• Maintain shared research codebases and contribute reusable infrastructure components
• Write clear documentation for experimental results and implementation decisions

Requirements & Skills

• Bachelor's or Master's in CS, AI, or a related technical field (2024–2025 grad)
• Strong Python programming with hands-on PyTorch experience
• Familiarity with transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, or LLMs
• Exposure to distributed training or GPU programming is a strong plus
• Comfort reading and reproducing ML research papers
• Effective communicator in a fast-moving research environment

Benefits & Work Conditions

• $44–$60/hr with Meta RSUs and semi-annual performance bonuses
• Hybrid schedule with flexible remote days
• $3,000 annual wellness and education reimbursement
• Full medical, dental, vision, and mental health benefits
• On-campus gyms, cafeterias, and childcare support programs

Who Should Apply

New grads who are deeply technical, comfortable reading papers, and want to be close to frontier AI research without being in a pure research role. If you like building things that make researchers 10x more productive, this is the role for you.

About the Company

Meta Platforms runs FAIR — one of the world's top academic-quality AI research labs — alongside applied AI teams building the intelligence behind content ranking, ads, and generative AI features across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

How to Apply

Apply through Meta's university portal at metacareers.com. The interview process covers two coding rounds (algorithms and ML-specific) and one systems design or research discussion depending on team match.