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Luma AILuma AINew York, NY

Applied Research Scientist / Engineer

Work as a fullstack applied researcher adapting multimodal video foundation models for production. Focus on controllability, personalization, and end-user quality using SFT, RL, and data-driven refinement.

200k – 450k
Hybrid7+ YOEAI Research

About the role

What You'll Do

You will work as a fullstack applied researcher across modeling, data, systems, and evaluation to adapt and deploy models to production.

Controllability and Features

  • Leverage a toolkit spanning SFT, RL, personalization, distillation, control adapters, and more, to develop and maintain model variants purpose-built for user environments and creative partners.

Personalization

  • Architect the data engine for rapid adaptation.
  • Leverage proprietary, vertical-specific datasets to create specialized finetunes and improve future training recipes, ensuring our models rely on data that reflects real-world use cases.

End-User Quality

  • Define and drive end-user quality – setting success metrics, building user-aligned evaluations, and iterating on the model/data/evals loop to meet strict fidelity and reliability targets in specific enterprise verticals.

Cross-functional Collaboration

  • Partner closely with Product, Research, and Design to translate creative intent and user feedback into model behavior, intuitive controls, and production-ready capabilities for users and partners.

Who You Are

  • Product-Obsessed Researcher/Engineer: Treat end users and partners as collaborators and enjoy solving specific “last mile” problems—not just optimizing public metrics.
  • ML Expert: Strong ML fundamentals with deep experience in visual generative models (diffusion/transformers or related architectures). Ideal candidates also have a deep understanding of at least one: fine-tuning, personalization, domain adaptation, data curation, targeted distillation, interpretability, or human-feedback-driven refinement.
  • Hands-On Builder: Strong Python and deep learning engineering skills (ideally PyTorch), comfortable moving between research prototypes and production systems.

Bonus Points

  • Contributions to state-of-the-art models in image/video generation.
  • Experience collaborating with creative partners (VFX, animation, film, design tools).
  • Track record building workflows/tools that materially improve iteration speed and evaluation rigor.
  • Familiarity with large-scale training infrastructure and distributed systems (Ray, Slurm, Kubernetes).

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $200,000 – $450,000 per year.

Skills

PythonPyTorchDiffusion ModelsTransformersFine-TuningPersonalizationDomain AdaptationData CurationDistillationSftRlInterpretabilityHuman Feedback

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