Hybrid Member of Technical Staff – Multi-Modal, Vision

at Liquid AI

• Job title: Member of Technical Staff – Multi-Modal, Vision
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Postgraduate Degree
• Tech skills: Python
• Location requirements: Hybrid, San Francisco, United States

About the role

• Member of Technical Staff developing vision-language models for Liquid AI, collaborating with cross-functional teams on model architecture and deployment responsibilities.

Responsibilities

• The VLM team builds vision-language models that run on-device, under tight latency and memory constraints, without sacrificing quality.
• Join a focused, hands-on group that works directly on models and collaborates closely with our pretraining, post-training, and infrastructure teams.
• Lead a new model capability end-to-end from task spec through data curation, training recipe, ablations, evaluation, and into the final shipped model.
• Improve visual reasoning through reinforcement learning and preference optimization methods.
• Push the quality-efficiency frontier on token efficiency via encoder/connector design.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience in training or evaluating VLMs with demonstrated experimental rigor.
• Ability to turn research ideas into scalable implementations, refine and iterate through hypotheses.
• Proficiency in Python and at least one deep learning framework.
• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field; or equivalent industry experience.
• Building or optimizing multimodal training or data pipelines.
• Experience with distributed training (DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron-LM, etc.).
• Multimodal post-training experience (SFT, preference optimization, RL-style methods).
• Dataset design and data quality expertise (quality and diversity assessment, long-tail mining).
• Prior open-source contributions (code, data, models) on GitHub or Hugging Face.
• Published research at top AI conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ECCV, ICLR, ACL, etc.).
• Experience with computer vision or visual representation learning.

Benefits

• Full ownership: You own your work from architecture to deployment.
• Compensation: Competitive base salary with equity in a unicorn-stage company
• Health: We pay 100% of medical, dental, and vision premiums for employees and dependents
• Financial: 401(k) matching up to 4% of base pay
• Time Off: Unlimited PTO plus company-wide Refill Days throughout the year