AI Research Engineer (Model Compression & Quantization)
Tether Operations Limited5 months ago
Remote, WorldwideSenior
Responsibilities
- Apply low-bit and mixed-precision 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 across text, image, and audio inputs.
- Implement pruning methods to remove redundant parameters and attention heads while maintaining task performance.
- Analyze trade-offs among model size, latency, memory usage, throughput, and accuracy, and propose empirically supported improvements.
- Develop compression pipelines and apply advanced methods such as adaptive pruning schedules and intermediate feature matching.
- Establish performance and fidelity metrics and address production inference bottlenecks for edge deployment.
- Track 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 in top-tier conferences.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- Ideally, a PhD in NLP, Machine Learning, or a related field, with a strong AI R&D publication record at leading conferences.
- Hands-on experience with PyTorch or equivalent deep learning frameworks.
- Hands-on experience with Quantization-Aware Training and Post-Training Quantization.
- Research and practical experience applying knowledge distillation to compress large models.
- Research and practical 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 preferred, particularly for low-level quantization kernels or inference optimization.
Benefits
- Remote work with a globally distributed team.
- Opportunity to conduct applied AI research and publish findings in major technical conferences.
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.