Member of Technical Staff - Applied ML, Japanese Multimodal

The role

You will own the technical path from customer problems to deployed AI solutions. You will work on model deployment, inference optimization, and building software for robust product capabilities.

What you will do

• Own applied ML projects for customers in Japan from discovery to production deployment.
• Integrate, profile, and optimize model inference for latency, throughput, memory, power, cost, and reliability.
• Build software including data pipelines, evaluation systems, serving components, and reference implementations.
• Fine-tune or post-train models using supervised fine-tuning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and preference optimization.
• Design task-specific evaluations and conduct systematic error analysis.
• Work directly with customer engineering teams during design, integration, testing, and rollout.
• Turn deployment lessons into reusable tooling and feedback for models and product roadmap.

Required qualifications

• Strong engineering skills and experience building, testing, and shipping production-quality ML systems.
• Hands-on experience deploying modern language models, multimodal models, or other deep learning systems.
• Experience with model serving, performance profiling, or inference optimization.
• Proficiency with the open-source ML ecosystem.
• Experience designing evaluations and analyzing model failures.
• Comfort leading technical discussions with customers and translating ambiguous requirements into shipped systems.
• Professional proficiency in English.

Nice to have

• Working proficiency in Japanese.
• Experience with LLM post-training methods.
• Experience with inference and deployment frameworks such as vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, ONNX Runtime, MLX.
• Familiarity with quantization, hardware-aware optimization, or deployment on mobile, embedded, automotive, or other edge platforms.
• Experience with multimodal systems involving text, vision, audio, or sensor data.
• Experience delivering ML systems for enterprise or regulated environments.
• Experience leveraging agents to amplify your own work.

Benefits

• High-impact work
• Distinctive technical problems
• Direct access to core teams
• Ownership in a growing market
• Supportive & growth-driven culture
• Primarily remote work
• Flexible working hours
• Unlimited paid time off
• Competitive salary
• Equity in a unicorn-stage company
• Standard benefits for employees in Japan

About the company

Spun out of MIT CSAIL, Liquid AI builds general-purpose AI systems that run efficiently across deployment targets. They partner with enterprises across consumer electronics, automotive, life sciences, and financial services.