Open-source research, at the frontier
3 months in San Francisco
The Base Labs Fellowship is a 12-week research program for people who want to do serious work on what makes models useful after pre-training, and want it to happen in the open.
We pair each Fellow 1:1 with a senior Base Labs researcher and hand them a real problem with scope and stakes from day one: post-training, specialization, memory, serving, the techniques that decide what open models can actually do.
You drive the project, and we provide the compute, the mentorship an the conviction that this research belongs in the world rather than behind closed weights. Fellows work from our San Francisco offices alongside the team building Baseten's production infrastructure, with the opportunity to convert to a full-time research role at the end of the program.
Why we're doing this
The most capable models in the world are increasingly held by a handful of labs, and the research that improves them happens where few people can see it. We think that's a narrower future than the one worth building. Open models are already good; the open question is how much further they can go once you take seriously the work that comes after pre-training; specialization, memory, reasoning, and serving models efficiently. Base Labs exists to do that work and to publish it, so that the ability to get more out of a model isn't something only two or three companies know how to do.
Base Labs is designed to let researchers focus on the work that matters
The work
Mentorship
Every Fellow is paired 1:1 with a senior Base Labs researcher - Charles O'Neill, Michael Psenka, or Max Kirkby - who stays close to the project from first question to final result.
A path to staying
Strong Fellows may be offered a full-time research role at Base Labs at the end of the program.
Compute
Fellows get a dedicated compute budget sized for real experiments, training runs, and evaluations, not toy versions of them.
Publication
We support Fellows in publishing at top venues (ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR) and every result is meant to go out in the open.
A real problem
You take on a research problem with genuine scope and stakes from day one, chosen to matter both as open science and to where Baseten is headed.
Everything else is handled
Stipend
Fellows receive a $15,000 stipend for the 12 weeks.
Workspace
Fellows work from our San Francisco offices, alongside the research and engineering teams behind Baseten's production infrastructure.
Community
You join a small founding research culture with connections across Baseten's network and the wider open-source ML ecosystem.
Housing and meals
Housing is covered for the full program, along with meals and a travel budget for relevant conferences and workshops.
Focus tracks
Continual learning
Specialization under real workloads
Alignment as a craft
Reasoning that scales and is internally congruent
Memory and its persistence
Serving at the economics that make the rest possible
Next cohort September 2026
Join the Fellowship program
Applications for the Autumn 2026 cohort are now open.
Frequently asked questions
The fellowship is a 12-week research program for people who want to work on post-training, specialization, memory, reasoning, and model serving in the open.
Yes. We can help with travel and housing support for Fellows joining us in San Francisco for the full program.
Each Fellow is paired with a senior researcher and scoped onto a real problem that matters both to open science and to Baseten's production direction.
The program is full-time and in-person by default, with days structured around close collaboration, independent research time, and regular reviews.
The fellowship is designed around in-person work in San Francisco, but we can make exceptions in a small number of cases when the fit is strong.
Fellows receive a stipend, housing support, meals, travel budget for relevant conferences, compute access, and direct mentorship from the research team.