Join Empero as a contributor. Work alongside the people who train our models, on the problems you care about, in the open: research, data, systems, community and the business around them.
Apply →How contributing works. Contributing is voluntary and unpaid. There are no fixed hours and no obligation to continue: you choose what you work on, how much time you spend and when you stop. It is not an employment relationship.
Anything beyond that, such as a paid role or equity, would only ever be agreed separately and in writing.
Architecture, pretraining, optimizers and scaling experiments.
Datasets, reasoning traces, benchmarks, SFT and RL.
GPU kernels, training infrastructure, inference and GGUF, Abacus (Rust).
Model cards, documentation, the website, design and developer relations.
Partnerships with compute providers, hardware vendors and platforms.
Have an idea that doesn't fit? Pick the closest area and tell us about it in your application.
Free access to our model APIs and, where available, compute for your experiments.
Work directly with the people who train our models, with honest feedback on your work.
Your name in model cards, release notes and the repositories you contribute to.
Co-authorship on papers and technical reports for substantial contributions.
Checkpoints, internal tools and releases before they go public.
A seat in our internal research chat and reading groups.
A written reference or contribution certificate on request.
When paid positions open, contributors are the first people we talk to.
Long-term contributors may be offered a stake in the company as it grows. This is a possibility, not a promise; any offer would be made separately, in writing.
No. Contributing is voluntary and unpaid, with no fixed hours or obligations. When paid roles open, contributors are the first people we talk to.
Anywhere. We work remotely and in English.
We use AI assistance to review written answers, after removing your email address, phone numbers and postal addresses. It scores applications and tasks against a fixed rubric and summarizes them for us. It can move a strong application on to the skill task, but it never rejects anyone: a person reviews every application it does not advance and makes every rejection and invitation. Your application is deleted 6 months after the last activity, or after 24 months if you join the talent pool. You can ask us to delete it at any time at [email protected]. Details are in our privacy policy.