Skill Checklist for Frontier Lab Research Engineers
kalyan_kpl · x · 2026-07-13
A forwarded post notes that frontier labs like OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Meta expect research engineers to possess a few core foundational skills:
- LLM Internal Mechanics: Attention, RoPE, KV Cache, MoE, Normalization, Embedding
- Post-training & Alignment: PPO, DPO, GRPO, Reward Models, Preference Optimization
- Mathematical Foundations: Linear Algebra, Probability, Optimization, and Formula Derivation
- Training & Decoding: Optimizers, Learning Rate Scheduling, Mixed Precision, Sampling, Beam Search, Speculative Decoding
The post emphasizes that if you are aiming for a research role, you will inevitably encounter these topics during interviews and in actual work.
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