AI Research Engineer (Model Compression & Quantization)
Tether Operations Limited5 months ago
Remote, WorldwideSenior
Responsibilities
- Apply low-bit quantization to LLMs, VLMs, and other multimodal generative AI models while preserving accuracy and output quality.
- Use knowledge distillation to transfer capabilities from large teacher models to smaller student models for efficient multimodal reasoning.
- Implement pruning methods that remove redundant parameters and attention heads without sacrificing task performance.
- Evaluate trade-offs among model size, latency, memory, throughput, and accuracy, and propose improvements based on empirical results.
- Research and apply mixed-precision quantization, adaptive pruning schedules, intermediate feature matching, and other advanced compression strategies.
- Build robust compression pipelines and establish performance and fidelity metrics for production inference.
- Monitor current research in model compression for multimodal and generative architectures.
- Document methodologies, experiments, and results to support reproducibility, collaboration, and stakeholder communication.
- Author technical papers and publish model-compression research at top-tier conferences.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- PhD in NLP, Machine Learning, or a related field is preferred.
- Strong AI R&D background with a solid publication record at A* conferences is preferred.
- Experience with PyTorch or an equivalent deep learning framework.
- Hands-on experience with Quantization-Aware Training and Post-Training Quantization.
- Research and hands-on experience applying knowledge distillation to compress large models.
- Research and hands-on experience applying model pruning to compress large models.
- Strong understanding of neural network architectures and training, including transformers, LLMs, VLMs, backpropagation, optimization, and fine-tuning.
- Familiarity with C++ is a plus, particularly for low-level quantization kernels or inference optimizations.
Benefits
- Remote work from locations around the world.
- Opportunity to collaborate with a global AI research team in the fintech and digital-asset industry.
About Tether Operations Limited
Tether Operations Limited develops and issues reserve-backed digital tokens used by exchanges, wallets, payment processors, and merchants, most notably the USDT stablecoin available across multiple blockchains. Founded in 2014 and privately held, it earns revenue from token issuance, reserve management, and related services, and has expanded into tokenization, peer-to-peer communications (Keet), and Bitcoin mining. USDT is widely used in crypto trading and cross-border transfers, including in emerging markets.