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Member of Mathematical Staff

SF Tensor· SF Tensor
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Hybrid (San Francisco)$225k - $315kFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Role focused on owning the math behind the proof engine and formal verification for frontier AI compute systems, including kernel proofing, model proofs, and formal methods integration with engineering.

Responsibilities

  • Own the proof engine end-to-end, ensuring kernels can be proven across edge cases
  • Collaborate with the engineering team on building formal models of new hardware
  • Formalize numeric stability and drivers of model convergence across diverse architectures
  • Research the extent to which we can predict training divergence during runs
  • Collaborate with the research team on post-training formal proofs and program verification
  • Formalize low-precision computation and its numerical stability
  • Collaborate with the engineering team on formally proving sandboxes are safe

Qualifications

  • A PhD in Math is strongly recommended but not required: what matters is what you've proven and built
  • Good judgement about when a full proof is worth it and when a cheaper guarantee is enough
  • Pragmatic about tooling and knowledge of SMT, interactive proofs, and custom decision procedures
  • Comfortable owning an open-ended problem and setting your own research agenda
  • Ability to explain a proof strategy to engineers who may not know the math and push back on corners

Skills

Required:Proof engineeringFormal modeling of hardwareNumerical stability analysis

Benefits

  • Meaningful equity and benefits
  • relocation assistance (office in San Francisco)
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About SF Tensor

Infrastructure for AI labs to focus on research.

AI researchers should be pushing the boundaries of what's possible with new architectures and training methods. Instead, they waste weeks configuring cloud infrastructure, debugging distributed systems, and optimizing their GPU code. We know because we lived it: While training our own models across thousands of GPUs earlier this year, we spent more time fighting our infrastructure than doing actual research. That why we're building two things. First, Elastic Cloud: a managed platform that automatically finds the cheapest GPUs across all providers, handles spot instance preemption, and cuts compute costs by up to 80%. Second, automatic kernel optimization that makes training code run faster by modeling hardware topology, often beating hand-tuned implementations. The problem is that getting high performance across different hardware is genuinely hard. NVIDIA's CUDA moat exists because writing fast kernels requires deep expertise. Most teams either accept vendor lock-in or hire expensive kernel engineers. Our goal is to break the CUDA moat. The compute bottleneck is the biggest constraint on AI progress. NVIDIA can't manufacture enough GPUs, and their monopoly keeps prices astronomical. Meanwhile, AMD, Google, and Amazon are shipping capable alternative hardware that nobody uses because the software is too hard. We're breaking that moat. If we succeed, anyone will be able to train state-of-the-art models without thinking past their PyTorch code.

machine-learningopen-sourcecloud-computingai

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