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 larger teacher models to smaller student models across text, image, and audio inputs.
- Implement pruning methods to remove redundant parameters and attention heads without materially reducing task performance.
- Evaluate trade-offs among model size, latency, memory, throughput, and accuracy across compression approaches.
- Research and apply mixed-precision quantization, adaptive pruning schedules, intermediate feature matching, and other advanced compression strategies.
- Develop robust compression pipelines and address bottlenecks in production inference for edge devices.
- Stay current with research on compression for multimodal and generative architectures.
- Document methods, experiments, and results to support reproducibility, collaboration, and stakeholder communication.
- Author technical papers and publish model-compression findings at top-tier conferences.
Requirements
- Degree in Computer Science or a related field; a PhD in NLP, Machine Learning, or a related field is preferred.
- Solid track record in AI research and development, ideally including publications at A* conferences.
- Experience with PyTorch or an equivalent deep learning framework.
- Hands-on experience with both Quantization-Aware Training and Post-Training Quantization.
- Research and practical experience with knowledge distillation for compressing large models.
- Research and practical experience with model pruning for compressing 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 work on advanced multimodal AI and efficient edge deployment in a fintech and digital-asset company.
Categories
AI ResearchML Engineering
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.