AI Researcher - Efficient AI; Contractor

Step into the innovative world of LG Electronics. As a global leader in technology, LG Electronics is dedicated to creating innovative solutions for a better life. Our brand promise, 'Life's Good', embodies our commitment to ensuring a happier life for all. We have a rich history spanning over six decades and a global presence in over 290 locations. Our diverse portfolio includes Home Appliance Solutions, Media Entertainment Solutions, Vehicle Solutions, and Eco Solutions.

Our management philosophy, "Jeong-do Management," embodies our commitment to high ethical standards and transparent operations. Grounded in the principles of 'Customer-Value Creation' and 'People-Oriented Management', these values shape our corporate culture, fostering creativity, diversity, and integrity. At LG, we believe in the power of collective wisdom through an inclusive work environment. Join us and become a part of a company that is shaping the future of technology.

At LG, we strive to make Life Good for Everyone.

LG's Emerging Technology Lab (ETL) is the catalyst for technological innovation within LG’s CTO organization. Located in the Silicon Valley and New Jersey, we drive excellence across CTO organizations and business units by pioneering in select emerging technology areas. As the Center of Excellence (CoE), we define and shape key technology domains, setting strategic directions that foster impactful internal and external partnerships to deliver measurable business value.

We are seeking a Contract AI Researcher - Efficient AI to join LG's Emerging Technology Lab in Santa Clara, CA (hybrid). This is an exciting opportunity to work at the forefront of AI efficiency research, developing technologies that make modern LLMs, VLMs, multimodal models, and AI agents faster, smaller, and more deployable in real-world environments.

In this role, you will explore cutting‑edge areas such as model compression, quantization, efficient inference, reasoning optimization, and next‑generation AI architectures. Your work will help enable advanced AI capabilities across LG's future products and platforms, including AI PCs, edge devices, robotics, and intelligent vehicle systems.

The ideal candidate enjoys bridging research and implementation, transforming ideas from the latest scientific literature into working prototypes and measurable improvements. You will have the opportunity to collaborate with experienced researchers, contribute to publications and intellectual property, and help shape the future of efficient, on‑device AI.

• Research, prototype, and implement AI methods that improve model efficiency, inference performance, and deployment feasibility on constrained devices.
• Optimize modern LLMs, SLMs, VLMs, multimodal models, and agentic workloads across post‑training, inference, and deployment workflows.
• Propose and evaluate novel compression methods (PTQ, QAT, pruning, low‑rank approximation, etc) for on‑device LLM/VLM enablement.
• Devise approaches to address challenges related to long‑context inference and KV cache compression in the context of reasoning and agentic applications.
• Develop gradient‑free and back propagation‑free methods for model merging, compression, and efficiency‑driven optimization.
• Implement and evaluate emerging efficient architectures and modules, including MoE, SSMs, hybrid models, Looped Transformers, etc.
• Prototype inference‑time optimization methods such as speculative decoding, constrained decoding, low‑latency generation, and kernel‑level optimization.
• Build experimental pipelines, perform evaluations on standardized language, vision, reasoning, and agentic benchmarks.
• Contribute to publications, technical reports, open‑source releases, invention disclosures, and IP submissions where appropriate.

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Machine Learning, Mathematics, or a related technical field. Relevant post‑graduate research and/or industry experience is preferred but not required.
• Research or engineering experience in ML, efficient AI, model optimization, or AI systems.
• Strong…