diff --git a/src/hearth/modules/__init__.py b/src/hearth/modules/__init__.py
index 477a38f..9fca930 100644
--- a/src/hearth/modules/__init__.py
+++ b/src/hearth/modules/__init__.py
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 from .base import BaseModule
 from .wrappers import Residual, ReZero, TimeMasked
 from .normalization import LayerNormSimple, MaskedLayerNorm
-from .embeddings import AbsolutePositionalEmbedding
+from .embeddings import AbsolutePositionalEmbedding, TransformerEmbedding
 from .transformer import Boom, TransformerEncoder, TransformerEncoderBlock
 
 __all__ = [
@@ -17,4 +17,5 @@
     'Boom',
     'TransformerEncoder',
     'TransformerEncoderBlock',
+    'TransformerEmbedding',
 ]
diff --git a/src/hearth/modules/embeddings.py b/src/hearth/modules/embeddings.py
index f102da0..b714128 100644
--- a/src/hearth/modules/embeddings.py
+++ b/src/hearth/modules/embeddings.py
@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
 from torch import nn
 
 from hearth.modules import BaseModule
+from hearth.modules.normalization import MaskedLayerNorm
 
 
 class AbsolutePositionalEmbedding(BaseModule):
@@ -45,3 +46,69 @@ def forward(self, tokens: torch.Tensor) -> torch.Tensor:
         )  # (bs, max_seq_length)
 
         return self.embedding(position_ids)
+
+
+class TransformerEmbedding(BaseModule):
+    """simple version of embedding used in transformer models.
+
+    Note:
+      this embedding does not use token type embeddings as used in some bert models. If
+      using with a pretrained model it's reccomended that you first add these to word embeddings.
+
+    Args:
+        vocab_size: vocabulary size for word embeddings.
+        features: number of features in embedding space.
+        max_len: maximum sequence length for positional embeddings. Defaults to 512.
+        dropout: dropout rate. Defaults to 0.1.
+        layer_norm_eps: epsilon for layer normalization. Defaults to 1e-12.
+        padding_idx: index for non-valid padding timesteps. Defaults to 0.
+
+    Example:
+        >>> from torch import nn
+        >>> from hearth.modules import TransformerEmbedding
+        >>>
+        >>> emb = TransformerEmbedding(1000, 256, padding_idx=0)
+
+        >>> tokens = torch.tensor([[99, 6, 55, 1, 0, 0],
+        ...                        [8, 22, 7, 8, 3, 11]])
+        >>> out = emb(tokens)
+        >>> out.shape
+        torch.Size([2, 6, 256])
+
+        >>> (out == 0.0).all(-1)
+        tensor([[False, False, False, False, True,  True],
+                [False, False, False, False, False, False]])
+
+        >>> emb.build_mask(tokens)
+        tensor([[ True,  True,  True,  True, False, False],
+                [ True,  True,  True,  True,  True,  True]])
+    """
+
+    def __init__(
+        self,
+        vocab_size: int,
+        features: int,
+        max_len: int = 512,
+        dropout: float = 0.1,
+        layer_norm_eps: float = 1e-12,
+        padding_idx: int = 0,
+    ):
+        super().__init__()
+        self.out_features = features
+        self.padding_idx = padding_idx
+        self.word_embeddings = nn.Embedding(vocab_size, features, padding_idx=padding_idx)
+        self.position_embeddings = AbsolutePositionalEmbedding(
+            features, max_len, padding_idx=padding_idx
+        )
+        self.norm = MaskedLayerNorm(features, eps=layer_norm_eps)
+        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(dropout)
+
+    @torch.jit.export
+    def build_mask(self, tokens: torch.Tensor) -> torch.Tensor:
+        """get a mask where all valid timesteps are True"""
+        return tokens != self.padding_idx
+
+    def forward(self, tokens: torch.Tensor) -> torch.Tensor:
+        x = self.word_embeddings(tokens) + self.position_embeddings(tokens)
+        x = self.norm(x, self.build_mask(tokens))
+        return self.dropout(x)