Research Engineer / Research Scientist

The role

Researchers will design and train foundation models for personal AI. The role involves pushing the frontier of deep learning with a focus on architectures for continuous learning, personalization, and local hardware efficiency.

What you will do

• Design, train, and evaluate novel foundation models optimized for reasoning, multimodal understanding, and extreme personalization.
• Pioneer research in continual learning to enable real-time adaptation without catastrophic forgetting.
• Develop advanced techniques for data efficiency, alignment, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning.
• Partner with the infrastructure team to scale experimental architectures across large compute clusters.
• Take ownership of the research lifecycle from ideating algorithms to scaling large training runs.

Required qualifications

• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, or equivalent practical industry experience.
• Deep understanding of modern deep learning architectures (e.g., Transformers, diffusion models) and advanced training methodologies.
• Extensive hands-on experience with PyTorch or JAX.
• Track record of writing clean, scalable code for model training.
• Proven ability to take open-ended research problems from mathematical formulation to working, scaled implementations.
• A highly collaborative mindset and a bias for action.

Nice to have

• Track record of impactful publications at top-tier AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML) or equivalent industry research breakthroughs.
• Specific expertise in continual learning, reinforcement learning, or optimizing models for edge/on-device inference.
• Experience pre-training or aligning frontier-scale language or multimodal models.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
• unlimited PTO
• relocation assistance as needed

Before you apply

• We sponsor visas and are committed to supporting the process for the right candidate.

About the company

River's mission is to create personal AI owned and shaped by each individual. The team consists of scientists, engineers, and builders from top tech companies and AI labs.