Research Engineer -- Vision and Vision-Language Models

The role

You will be a core contributor on the Vision Team building models for image understanding, computer use, and agentic visual tasks. You will work across the full model development stack including data sourcing, pretraining, post-training, reinforcement learning, and evaluation.

What you will do

• End-to-end pretraining and post-training of vision-language models
• Large-scale vision and multimodal training runs
• Vision and multimodal dataset sourcing, generation, curation, processing, and evaluation
• Reinforcement learning and other post-training methodologies for vision-language models
• Computer use, visual agents, and other multi-turn agentic vision tasks
• Architecture, data, and training methodology ablations and improvements
• Performance optimization of training and data processing stacks

Required qualifications

• Strong research taste and intuition
• Strong implementation and prototyping ability
• A high rate of learning and an ability to rapidly become effective in unfamiliar technical areas
• Strong general machine learning intuition
• Ability to work well with others in a high-paced research setting
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Experience with large-scale model pretraining, post-training, reinforcement learning, or related methodologies
• Experience sourcing, generating, or curating vision datasets, including synthetic data generation
• Familiarity with image processing tools, libraries, or pipelines
• Experience training models on large-scale, multi-node GPU clusters
• Strong grasp of experimental methodology for running rigorous ablations and hypothesis testing
• Understanding of large-scale, highly parallel data processing pipelines

Nice to have

• Experience working with vision, vision-language, video, or other multimodal models or datasets is highly valuable
• Experience training vision-language models is a plus
• Experience with computer use agents, visual agents, GUI understanding, or other multi-turn multimodal tasks is a plus
• Experience with frontend development, web frameworks, UI/UX implementation, or mobile development is valuable
• Published machine learning research in well-respected venues is a plus
• Postgraduate study in a scientific or technical field such as Computer Science, EE/EECS, Mathematics, Physics, or Machine Learning is a plus

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and FSA plans
• Competitive compensation and 401(k) plan
• Relocation and immigration support on a case-by-case basis
• In-office snacks and meals provided
• Unlimited PTO and company holidays

About the company

Zyphra's research methodology is grounded in methodical, step-by-step approaches to ambitious goals. Both deep research and engineering excellence are equally valued.