ML Research Engineer - Pre-training (LLMs)

ML Research Engineer; Pre-training (LLMs)
Bengaluru · Full-time · Experience: 2–4 yrs
About EkaCare and the mission
EkaCare is India's connected healthcare platform: an EMR that doctors run their practices on, a personal health record used by millions of Indians, and one of the deepest integrations with India's ABDM digital-health rails. Our Parrotlet family of medical models already serves Indian doctors in production, and we open-source our work where it counts.
The role
The recipe is the game. You'll work at the heart of the 30B CPT: what goes into the ~500B-token mix, in what order, at what scale, proven cheaply at proxy scale, then spent confidently on the big run.

What you'll do

Design and run CPT/mid-training ablation ladders at proxy scale, the experimental backbone that decides the real run.
Own data-mix and curriculum empirics: medical vs general, Indic vs English, replay ratios (~70% design point), annealing schedules.
Debug training at scale: loss spikes, precision issues, dataloader stalls, checkpoint pathologies.
Build per-stage eval hooks so every CPT phase has a scoreboard, not a vibe.
Run tokeniser, long-context and MoE-health experiments (routing balance, expert utilisation).
What we look for
2–4 years in ML with pretraining or CPT you
personally ran
at ≥1B scale (ideally ≥7B, 100B+ tokens) — the recipe was yours to break and fix.
Fluency with Megatron/NeMo/TorchTitan-class trainers and distributed fundamentals (TP/PP/DP, mixed precision).
Empirical rigour: you design ablations that answer questions.
You read papers fast and implement faster.
Bonus
MoE training exposure; scaling-laws mindset.
Indic-language or domain-specific (medical/legal/code) pretraining.
Kernels curiosity — you've opened a profiler and enjoyed it.
Why this is a rare gig
Open source, with your name on it
: weights and technical reports ship publicly.
India-scale mission
: models for a billion people in their own languages.
Compute that’s rare to fine
: dedicated multi-node H200 training under a national grant.
Small senior team:
you work with the people who own the recipe.
A live deployment path
: Government institutes, EkaCare's doctors and patients use what you ship.