
AI Research Engineer (Model Compression & Quantization)
Tether Operations Limited4 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.
- Build compression pipelines and establish metrics for model size, latency, throughput, memory use, accuracy, and fidelity.
- Analyze efficiency-versus-accuracy trade-offs and propose improvements based on empirical results.
- Research advanced methods such as adaptive pruning schedules and distillation with intermediate feature matching.
- Identify and address production inference bottlenecks for low-memory, low-latency edge deployment.
- Document methodologies, experiments, and results to support reproducibility and collaboration.
- Author technical papers and publish model-compression research at leading AI conferences.
Requirements
- Degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- Strong AI R&D background with an excellent publication record, preferably including A* conference publications.
- Hands-on 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 with knowledge distillation for model compression.
- Research and hands-on experience with model pruning for model compression.
- Strong understanding of neural-network architectures and training, including transformers, LLMs, VLMs, backpropagation, optimization, and fine-tuning.
- A PhD in NLP, Machine Learning, or a related field is preferred.
- Familiarity with C++ is a plus, particularly for low-level quantization kernels or inference optimization.
Benefits
- Remote work with a globally distributed team.
- Opportunity to work on multimodal AI compression and efficient edge deployment in a digital-finance technology company.
- Research and publication opportunities at leading conferences.
Categories
AI ResearchML Engineering