Pluralis Research
via Ashby
Research Scientist Intern
This is the employer's own posting, not a copy on a job board.
What we know
Is it still open?
Confirmed still open
Last checked 2d ago — checked against the employer's own applicant tracking system, which is the company answering directly.
We re-read the employer's own applicant tracking system and the posting was still there. That is the company answering directly.
How old is it?
Posted 14d ago
The date the source published, not the day we noticed it (2026-08-31). Last seen at its source 2h ago.
Is it remote?
Marked remote on the employer's board
Their board carries a remote setting on this posting — a field they filled in, not wording we read. The location field names somewhere specific, which is usually where the team or the entity sits.
Who may apply?
United States, Australia
The description states no restriction of its own. This is the source's own tag.
Pay not stated
Similar roles pay $110k–190.2k/yr
Middle 50% of 642 listings that do state pay — Operations · all levels · United States · USD/year. This employer has published no salary; this is what comparable listings we hold disclose, never converted between currencies or periods. How this is calculated.
Skills named in the ad
Recognised terms only, from a fixed vocabulary — this is what CV matching compares against.
Carried by 1 source
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ashby employer's own board first seen 14d ago · last seen 2h ago
The listing
Pluralis Research works on Protocol Learning: training and serving large models in a fully decentralized way on small consumer-grade devices connected via the internet. Despite being dismissed as infeasible, we have made significant advances on this problem, most recently Agora, a permissionless run that pretrained an 8B model from scratch on consumer GPUs spread over the internet, with no single participant ever holding the full weights (tech report). While many of the core research problems have been solved, Protocol Learning unlocks a series of new challenges. For the mission in full, read A Third Path: Protocol Learning.
This setting breaks nearly every assumption of datacenter training and inference: communication-efficient training across different parallelism axes, fault tolerance as nodes join and drop mid-run, heterogeneous compute and networks, and robustness to malicious participants. Our published methods include Subspace Networks, Factored Gossip DiLoCo, AsyncMesh, and Sentinel.
As a Research Scientist Intern you join us for a 6-month, fixed-term research internship during your PhD, focused on publishing. You work on the problems that stay open as we push from the 8B run toward frontier scale, with access to significant compute and focused mentorship from senior scientists. These are foundational papers up for grabs.
Key Responsibilities
Publish in Tier-1 venues: Conduct novel research in Protocol Learning with the explicit goal of publishing in tier-1 ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR).
Own a real problem: Pick a question that blocks Protocol Learning at scale and answer it — the internship is scoped so a foundational paper is a realistic outcome, not a stretch goal.
What We're Looking For
Publication track record (required): Current PhD candidate with at least one publication in top-tier ML venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR).
Research focus: You work in a core technical area relevant to frontier models.
Technical depth: Strong theoretical understanding of deep learning and distributed systems principles.
Implementation skills: Proficiency in PyTorch and experience with large-scale training infrastructure.
Mission alignment: You believe Protocol Learning is the viable third path for collective, trustless, and sovereign AI.
FYI's
This is a 6-month, fixed-term research internship. We only hire in Australia and the US, and visa sponsorship is limited to these countries.
We work remotely across the world, with the main teams in Australia and North America. You'll need to be comfortable working across timezones.
Applicants must have professional-level English proficiency (written and spoken).
Recruiters: we aren't looking for agency support at this time. We'll reach out if we need help.
We are backed by Union Square Ventures and other tier-1 investors, and we are a world-class, deeply technical team of ML researchers. Pluralis is unapologetically ideological. We believe AI, and the world, end up on a better path if we succeed in implementing the protocol for intelligence. If this resonates, please apply.