Inception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Our Mercury model is the world’s fastest reasoning LLM and first commercially available diffusion LLM, delivering 5x greater speed and efficiency than today’s LLMs, with best-in-class quality.

We are the AI researchers and engineers behind such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO.

The Role

We seek experienced engineers and scientists to develop the evaluation metrics and systems that drive frontier LLM performance. You'll design the frameworks that tell us whether our models are improving and ensure they perform reliably at scale in production.

Key Responsibilities

Design, develop, and maintain robust evaluation frameworks and benchmarks for measuring LLM performance across diverse tasks and domains.
Define and implement quantitative metrics that capture model quality, safety, reliability, and regression detection.
Build scalable, automated evaluation pipelines that integrate into model training and deployment workflows.
Conduct rigorous statistical analysis of model outputs to identify failure modes, biases, and performance gaps.
Partner with product and customer-facing teams to translate real-world use cases into meaningful evaluation criteria.

Qualifications

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
At least 2 years of experience in ML evaluation, applied ML research, or a related engineering role.
Strong understanding of LLM fundamentals (autoregressive generation, instruction tuning, RLHF, in-context learning, decoding strategies).
Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch.
Experience designing and implementing evaluation metrics and benchmarks for generative models.
Solid foundation in statistics, experimental design, and hypothesis testing.
Experience with version control (Git) and containerization (Docker).
Excellent communication skills with the ability to distill complex evaluation results into actionable insights.

Preferred Skills

Experience with human-in-the-loop evaluation systems (Likert-scale annotation, pairwise preference ranking, red-teaming).
Familiarity with LLM safety and alignment evaluation (toxicity, hallucination detection, factual grounding).
Knowledge of existing benchmark suites (MMLU, HumanEval, HELM, BIG-Bench) and their limitations.
Experience building evaluation infrastructure at scale using cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
Familiarity with MLOps practices and CI/CD pipelines for model validation.
Experience with data engineering, large-scale data labeling, or synthetic data generation for evaluation purposes.

Why Join Inception

Work with World-Class Talent: Collaborate with the inventors of diffusion models and leading AI researchers
Shape Foundational Technology: Your decisions will influence how the next generation of AI products are built and used
Immediate Impact: Join at the ground floor where your contributions directly shape product direction and company trajectory

Perks & Benefits

Competitive salary and equity in a rapidly growing startup
Flexible vacation and paid time off (PTO)
Health, dental, and vision insurance
Catered meals (breakfast, lunch, & dinner)
Commuter subsidies
A collaborative and inclusive culture

About Us

Inception creates the world’s fastest, most efficient AI models. Today’s autoregressive LLMs generate tokens sequentially, which makes them painfully slow and expensive. Inception’s diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs) generate answers in parallel. They are 5x faster and more efficient, while delivering best-in-class quality.

Inception was co-founded by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, who co-invented such breakthrough AI technologies as diffusion models, flash attention, and DPO, UCLA professor Aditya Grover, who co-invented node2vec, decision transformers, and d1 reasoning, and Cornell professor and Afresh co-founder Volodymyr Kuleshov, who co-invented MDLM and Block Diffusion.

We pioneered the application of diffusion to language, with world’s first (and only) commercially available dLLM, Mercury. We are currently deploying our large-scale diffusion LLMs at Fortune 500 companies. Diffusion is the technology behind today’s image and video AI, and we’re making it the standard for LLMs as well.

Our team includes engineers from AWS, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft, HashiCorp, and OpenAI. Based in Palo Alto, CA, we are backed by top-tier venture capitalists, including Menlo Ventures, Mayfield, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Snowflake Ventures, Databricks, and Innovation Endeavors, and by tech luminaries such as Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy, and Eric Schmidt.

If you are talented, innovative, and ambitious, come help us invent the future of AI.

We are an equal opportunity employer and encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply.

Member of Technical Staff, Model Evaluation