# Research Scientist / Engineer – Foundation Model: Core Research

**Company:** [Luma AI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/lumalabs-ai)
**Location:** Palo Alto, CA
**Role:** AI Research
**Salary:** $250k – $450k/yr
**Skills:** Multimodal Ai, Machine Learning, Gpu Clusters, Distributed Computing, Scaling Laws, Long-Context Training, Research Infrastructure, Low-Precision Training, PyTorch, JAX
**Posted:** 2026-03-03

> Conducts core research on multimodal foundation models for world-simulations, bridging modeling, data, systems, and evaluation. Requires advanced degree in CS/ML, first-principles scaling intuition, and experience with large-scale GPU training.

## Job Description

## What You'll Do

### Unified Modeling & Efficiency
- Drive the core research that powers all of Luma's products — co-designing multimodal representations, advancing core algorithms for long-context training, and establishing rigorous scaling laws to predict performance across compute budgets.

### Alignment & Evaluation
- Close the gap between training loss and user experience. Develop proxy tasks and automated metrics that serve as the compass for research decisions — ensuring our models optimize for what actually matters to users, not just benchmarks.

### Research Infrastructure
- Build the engine for high-velocity research. Maintain production-research parity, ensure reproducibility, and design systems for rapid experimentation — so that novel ideas go from hypothesis to validated result as fast as possible.

## Who You Are
- A Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Physics, or Mathematics is essential.
- A 'first-principles' intuition for scaling. You don't just follow the literature; you understand why certain architectures succeed or fail at scale.
- Fluent in the language of frontier AI. You see research and engineering as a single, unified discipline.
- Proven ability to design and rigorously analyze experiments and to articulate complex technical concepts effectively.
- Practical experience with distributed or high-performance computing environments, particularly managing and optimizing training runs on large-scale **GPU clusters**.

## What Sets You Apart (Bonus Points)
- A track record of publishing at top-tier venues (**NeurIPS**, **ICML**, **ICLR**) and a mission-driven, "first-principles" mindset.
- **Infrastructure Expertise**: Proven ability to build and lead research infrastructure for technical teams, ensuring production-research parity.
- **Engineering Excellence**: Strong commitment to software engineering best practices, including optimizing for code readability and reusability, implementing comprehensive unit and integration tests, and maintaining high documentation standards (necessary docstrings).
- Experience with low-precision training and hardware-aware optimization for next-gen clusters.

## Compensation
The base pay range for this role is **$250,000 – $450,000** per year.

## Similar roles

- [Researcher, Alignment CoT Monitorability](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f7a16777-d1f6-4f3c-93c2-d554fa92d87a) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $250k – $445k/yr
- [Simulation Researcher/Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/0783f6ce-3002-437d-9cf5-ed0e195e9182) - Luma AI - Los Angeles, CA - $250k – $450k/yr
- [Research Scientist - World Model](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/5faee58d-db07-4225-972f-d41693ba6fbe) - Luma AI - Los Angeles, CA - $250k – $450k/yr
- [Researcher, Alignment Training](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/5d1388b9-49bc-4659-93e6-165aa8045734) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $250k – $445k/yr
- [Researcher, Alignment Science](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/bff54247-c297-4539-aea0-bd99d7ea00b9) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $250k – $445k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/23a08bb6-8ade-4b8b-8314-e007c0e95b88
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/23a08bb6-8ade-4b8b-8314-e007c0e95b88