AI Researcher — Distillation

The role

You will design and evaluate model distillation techniques to turn large models into smaller, faster systems. You will research tradeoffs between model size and performance and write research papers for top-tier venues.

What you will do

• Design and evaluate model distillation techniques
• Research tradeoffs between model size, latency, memory, and accuracy
• Develop novel distillation approaches for LLMs, long-context or specialized architectures, and inference-constrained environments
• Run large-scale experiments and ablations
• Analyze results rigorously
• Collaborate with engineers to productionize research outcomes
• Write and submit research papers to top-tier venues
• Contribute to internal research notes, technical blogs, and open-source projects

Required qualifications

• Strong background in machine learning research
• Hands-on experience with model distillation or closely related topics (compression, pruning, quantization, representation learning)
• Publication experience (conference or journal papers, workshop papers, or arXiv preprints)
• Solid understanding of deep learning fundamentals (optimization, training dynamics, generalization)
• Fluency in PyTorch (or equivalent) and research-grade experimentation
• Ability to clearly communicate research ideas, results, and limitations

Nice to have

• Experience distilling large language models
• Work on efficiency-focused research (latency, memory, throughput)
• Experience with long-context models or non-Transformer architectures
• Open-source contributions in ML or research tooling
• Prior startup or applied research experience

Benefits

• Real ownership over research direction at a Series A stage
• Strong support for publishing and open research
• Tight feedback loop between research and real-world deployment
• Access to meaningful compute and production-scale problems
• Small, highly technical team with deep ML and systems expertise

About the company

featherlessai is a Series A stage company with a small, highly technical team with deep ML and systems expertise.