Research Engineer, Vision

About this role

You will be a core contributor on Zyphra’s Vision Team building the next generation of vision-language models which can understand natural scenes with a focus on web, desktop, and mobile UIs. You will be deeply involved in the entire model training process from data gathering and processing to designing novel architectures and training methodologies. You will work across:

• Large-scale vision encoder and vision language training runs
• Performance optimization of our training stack
• Image and video dataset collection, processing, and evaluation
• Architecture and training methodology ablations and improvements

While deep expertise in all areas isn't required, you should be enthusiastic about learning each aspect as needed to drive our models forward. We also strongly look for velocity over position. However, having deep expertise in at least one of the above is helpful to begin contributing immediately.

• Strong research taste and intuition. The ability to work through a research project from conception to execution to write-up.
• Strong implementation and prototyping ability – can take an idea from conception to experimentation extremely quickly.
• The ability to work well and cooperate with others in a high-paced research setting.

• Experience with training and evaluating vision language models
• Experience with creating and collecting large scale machine learning datasets, especially in the visual modality
• Experience with training vision encoders using contrastive learning or other methods
• Experience with supervised fine tuning and preference learning methods as well as reinforcement learning methods
• A good intuitive ability to understand model behaviours and correct them through iterative fine tuning.
• Interest in grappling in detail with data and spending significant time involved in data engineering and synthetic data generation
• Postgraduate degree in scientific subject (Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Machine Learning, etc)
• Previously published machine learning research in well-respected venues
• Highly proficient with Pytorch and Python
• Are excited and able to rapidly learn new fields and implement new ideas
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills and can work effectively on both research and engineering implementation at scale.

• Our research methodology is to make grounded, methodical steps toward ambitious goals. Both deep research and engineering excellence are equally valued
• We strongly value new and crazy ideas and are very willing to bet big on new ideas
• We move as quickly as we can; we aim to make the bar to impact as low as possible
• We all enjoy what we do and love discussing AI

• Medical, dental, vision and FSA plans
• Competitive salary, equity and 401(k)
• Relocation and immigration support on a case-by-case basis
• On-site meals prepared by a dedicated culinary team;
  Thursday Happy Hours

• Willing to be in-person in our office in Palo Alto
• US authorization to work. We will consider O1 visa sponsorship for the right candidate