# Member of Technical Staff - Pretraining

**Company:** [Black Forest Labs](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/black-forest-labs)
**Location:** Freiburg, Germany
**Role:** AI Research
**Salary:** €130k – €340k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Python, PyTorch, Fsdp, Tensor Parallelism, Pipeline Parallelism, Distributed Training, Gpu Optimization, Multimodal Models, Visual Generative Models, Foundation Models, Pretraining, Tokenization, Optimizers, Attention Mechanisms, Training Algorithms
**Posted:** 2026-08-13

> Leads frontier-scale pretraining research for multimodal image, video, and audio foundation models, shaping architectures, objectives, data strategies, and distributed systems. The role requires prior ownership of production-grade foundation-model pretraining, deep Python and PyTorch expertise, and strong experience with visual generative models.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Lead large-scale pretraining experiments for multimodal image, video, and audio foundation models, including architecture, objective functions, and scaling strategies.
- Develop and evaluate novel ideas across architectures, optimizers, and training algorithms.
- Contribute across the full stack, from low-level GPU and systems optimizations to research code and high-level model design.
- Lead focused research projects independently and drive larger cross-team initiatives.

## Requirements
- Led or co-owned pretraining for a foundation model—image, video, language, or multimodal—that shipped to production or a major release.
- Experience making architectural decisions involving attention patterns, modulation schemes, loss formulations, and tokenization strategies.
- Deep experience with large-scale distributed training, including FSDP, tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and multi-node runs at 500+ GPUs.
- Experience debugging loss spikes, NaNs, throughput regressions, and silent correctness issues at scale.
- Strong intuition for architecture and objective design.
- Track record of shipping, demonstrated through top-venue publications paired with production impact or unambiguous production wins at a frontier lab.
- Deep Python and PyTorch proficiency, including the ability to read and modify low-level training code.
- Familiarity with visual generative models.

## Compensation
- Base annual salary: €130,000–€340,000, plus equity.

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