Research Engineer, Lead

The role

You will work on models that help understand and learn from professional design judgment. You will execute post-training research and engineering projects, including training reward and preference models.

What you will do

• Execute well-scoped post-training research and engineering projects.
• Train and evaluate reward and preference models.
• Explore and apply methods including supervised fine-tuning, distillation, preference optimization, and reinforcement learning.
• Develop rigorous evaluations for experimental results.
• Translate promising research results into production systems.
• Partner with Product and Design to understand model performance in workflows.
• Evaluate emerging post-training techniques and prototype approaches.
• Contribute to reliable training and experimentation infrastructure.
• Document experiments, results, and learnings.

Required qualifications

• Strong programming and software engineering skills, particularly for machine learning systems.
• Hands-on experience training or fine-tuning machine learning models.
• Experience with generative models, including diffusion or flow models, through professional work, research, or substantial technical projects.
• Familiarity with one or more post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, reward modeling, distillation, or reinforcement learning.
• Experience designing experiments and evaluating model performance.
• Strong fundamentals in machine learning and an ability to turn research ideas into working implementations.
• An interest in product-coupled research.
• Comfort working through technical problems where the answer isn't known in advance.
• A collaborative approach to research and engineering, including documenting results and incorporating feedback from others.

Nice to have

• Experience building or contributing to high-performance training or inference systems.
• Experience optimizing ML workloads or working with large-scale training infrastructure.
• Experience working with preference data or human-feedback systems.
• Experience taking ML experiments from prototype toward production.
• An interest in industrial design, physical products, or the people who make them.

Benefits

• 100% employer-sponsored medical coverage for employees, plus 25% coverage toward dependents
• Dental and vision coverage
• Mental health benefits
• Meaningful equity ownership
• Flexible PTO
• 401(k) with employer match
• Generous annual Learning & Development allowance
• Paid parental leave
• Weekly catered lunch at our San Francisco headquarters
• Monthly gym membership stipend

Before you apply

• Employment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check, as permitted by applicable law.

About the company

Vizcom is a Series B company where design teams bring ideas from sketch to product. The company provides tools for designers to sketch, render, explore color and materials, work in 3D, and prepare concepts for production.