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xAIxAIPalo Alto, CA

Member of Technical Staff - Multimodal Understanding

Develops large-scale distributed systems and pipelines for multimodal AI pre-training, post-training, and inference across image, video, audio, and text. Requires expert Python proficiency, experience with JAX/PyTorch/XLA, and scaling multimodal ML systems.

180k – 440k/yr
On-siteML Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and optimize large-scale distributed systems for multimodal pre-training, post-training, inference, data processing, and tokenization at web/petabyte scale.
  • Develop high-throughput pipelines for data acquisition, preprocessing, filtering, generation, decoding, loading, crawling, visualization, and management (images, videos, audio + text).
  • Advance multimodal capabilities including spatial-temporal compression, cross-modal alignment, world modeling, reasoning, emergent abilities, audio/image/video understanding & generation, real-time video processing, and noisy data handling.
  • Drive data quality and studies: curation (human/synthetic), filtering techniques, analysis, and scalable pipelines to support trillion-parameter models.
  • Create evaluation frameworks, internal benchmarks, reward models, and metrics that capture real-world usage, failure modes, interactive dynamics, and human-AI synergy.
  • Innovate on algorithms, modeling approaches, hardware/software/algorithm co-design, and scaling paradigms for state-of-the-art performance.
  • Build research tooling, user-friendly interfaces, prototypes/demos, full-stack applications, and enable rapid iteration based on feedback.
  • Work across the stack (pre-training → SFT/RL/post-training) to enable reasoning, tool calling, agentic behaviors, orchestration, and seamless real-time interactions.

Basic Qualifications

  • Hands-on experience with multimodal pre-training, post-training, or fine-tuning (vision, audio, video, or cross-modal).
  • Expert-level proficiency in Python (core language), with strong experience in at least one of: JAX / PyTorch / XLA.
  • Proven track record building or optimizing large-scale distributed ML systems (training/inference optimization, GPU utilization, multi-GPU/TPU setups, hardware co-design).
  • Deep experience designing and running data pipelines at scale: curation, filtering, generation, quality studies, especially for noisy/real-world multimodal data.
  • Strong fundamentals in evaluation design, benchmarks, reward modeling, or RL techniques (particularly for interactive/agentic behaviors).
  • Proactive self-starter who thrives in high-intensity environments and is passionate about pushing multimodal AI frontiers.
  • Willingness to own end-to-end initiatives and do whatever it takes to deliver breakthrough user experiences.

Preferred Skills and Experience

  • Experience leading major improvements in model capabilities through better data, modeling, algorithms, or scaling.
  • Familiarity with state-of-the-art in multimodal LLMs, scaling laws, tokenizers, compression techniques, reasoning, or agentic systems.
  • Proficiency in Rust and/or C++ for performance-critical components.
  • Hands-on work with large-scale orchestration tools such as Spark, Ray, or Kubernetes.
  • Background building full-stack tooling: performant interfaces, real-time research demos/apps, or end-to-end product ownership.
  • Passion for end-to-end user experience in interactive, real-time multimodal AI systems.

Compensation and Benefits

  • $180,000 - $440,000 USD base salary
  • Equity, comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage, access to a 401(k) retirement plan, short & long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and various other discounts and perks.

Skills

PythonJAXPyTorchXlaRustC++SparkRayKubernetesRlDistributed Systems

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