{"id":4222408,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cohesity-research-engineer-post-training-vision-language-models","title":"Research Engineer, Post-Training & Vision-Language Models","company":{"id":1043373,"name":"Cohesity","domain":"cohesity.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/cohesity-3","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":84,"open_postings":26,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.654,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":42,"computed_at":"2026-11-12T10:38:37Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Santa Clara, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":255600,"max":284000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":284000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"GRPO","optional":false},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"OCR","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"PPO","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"RLAIF","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":true},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":true},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-12T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-12","last_verified_at":"2026-11-13T05:57:54Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"Cohesity is a leader in AI-powered data security and management. Aided by an extensive ecosystem of partners, Cohesity makes it easy to secure, protect, manage, and get value from data - across the data center, edge, and cloud. Cohesity helps organizations defend against cybersecurity threats with comprehensive data security and management capabilities, including immutable backup snapshots, AI-based threat detection, monitoring for malicious behavior, and rapid recovery at scale.\nWe’ve been named a Leader by multiple analyst firms and have been globally recognized for Innovation, Product Strength, and Simplicity in Design.\nJoin us on our mission to shape the future of our industry.\nResearch Engineer, Post-Training & Vision-Language Models\nWant to join the leader in AI-powered document understanding?\nAbout the Role :\nEnterprise documents such as contracts, invoices, filings and reports hold some of the world’s most valuable data, and most of it is still locked in layouts, tables and charts that software struggles to read. The Gaia team at Cohesity is building a world-class agentic document processing product to change that.\nAt its heart are vision language models (VLMs) that read documents as images, extract structured data, understand complex layouts, tables and charts, and answer questions about their content. We’re looking for a Research Engineer to push that capability forward.\nYou’ll work where research meets production, owning the fine-tuning, evaluation and data pipelines that determine how well our models understand and act on real enterprise data. You’ll have broad scope, significant compute, and a direct line from your work to a shipping product. The problems are open-ended: the path is ambiguous, the signal is noisy, and the right answer takes both research taste and engineering execution.\nCohesity is the leader in AI-powered data protection and security, trusted by over 13,600 enterprise customers, including more than 85 of the Fortune 100 and nearly 70% of the Global 500. Together they entrust us with over 200 exabytes of data. We’re backed by NVIDIA, IBM, HPE, Cisco, AWS, Google Cloud and others, and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, with offices around the globe.\nWant to join a scaled multi-billion ARR private company? On a team that’s operating like a Series A company?\nHOW YOU'LL SPEND YOUR TIME HERE:\nEvaluate, select, and adapt VLMs (open-weight and API-based) for document parsing, layout understanding, table and chart extraction, OCR-heavy content, and document question answering. \nFine-tune vision-language models using SFT and latest RL techniques such as RLHF / RLAIF / RLVR, GRPO or PPO-style RL for document understanding to hill climb towards the best document understanding in the industry. \nBuild reinforcement learning (RL) training platforms, design reward signals, and optimize model reasoning. \nBuild and maintain evaluation harnesses to measure model performance across capability and reliability dimensions. \nCreate pipelines for synthetic data generation to support training and evaluation. \nDevelop and refine post-training recipes that measurably improve production model quality. \nCollaborate with the agentic engineering team so agents can perceive and act on visual inputs such as documents, screens, and diagrams. \nDebug training instabilities, regressions, and unexpected model behavior; establish best practices for reproducible training and experiment tracking. \nWE’D LOVE TO TALK TO YOU IF YOU HAVE MANY OF THE FOLLOWING:\nExperience\n5+ years of professional experience in machine learning engineering or research. \nHands-on experience training, fine-tuning, using RL techniques or evaluating large language or vision-language models. \nTrack record of taking models from experimentation to production. \nEducation\nMaster’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field preferred. \nRequired Skills\nLanguages: Python \nML/AI: PyTorch (or JAX), Hugging Face ecosystem, supervised fine-tuning, VLMs/LLMs \nEvaluation: building eval harnesses and benchmarks for model quality \nData: synthetic data generation, data curation pipelines \nPreferred / Nice-to-Have Skills\nDocument AI experience: OCR, layout analysis, table and chart extraction \nVisual grounding and region-level reasoning \nPost-training and distillation for smaller or on-prem-deployable models \nPublications or open-source contributions in post-training, alignment, or multimodal models \nPrior experience in enterprise data protection, security, or infrastructure software \nExpectations from the Role\nBalance research exploration with engineering rigor and reliable delivery. \nWork effectively across research and engineering and stay productive amid ambiguity and shifting priorities. \nCommunicate experimental results and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders. \nBe hands-on: write and review production-quality code and run experiments regularly. \nDisclosure Pursuant to Applicable State Equal Pay Transparency Laws - This position has a starting pay range as listed below. Actual salary depends upon many factors, including a candidate’s skills, qualifications and experience, location, and salary expectations, and therefore a starting salary at the low end, high end, or even above the stated range may be offered. This position may also be eligible for bonus compensation, commission (if in a sales function), and/or equity grants. Additionally, full-time employees are eligible to participate in our comprehensivebenefits framework, including health and wellness benefits, vacation, paid holidays and refresh days, 401(k) retirement plan, life and disability insurance coverages, and other benefits the Company may offer from time to time.\nPay Range :\n$255,600.00-$284,000.00The compensation noted above is based on an annualized hourly rate assuming normal full-time employment.\nData Privacy Notice for Job Candidates:\nFor information on personal data processing, please see our Privacy Policy.\nEqual Employment Opportunity Employer (EEOE)\nCohesity is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, veteran status or any other category protected by law.\nIf you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are limited in the ability or unable to access or use this online application process and need an alternative method for applying, you may contact us at 1-855-9COHESITY or  for assistance.\nIn-Office Expectations\nCohesity employees who are within a reasonable commute (e.g. within a forty-five (45) minute average travel time) work out of our core offices 2-3 days a week of their choosing.\nWe strongly prefer candidates who are currently located in or near the designated job location. Candidates outside the area should apply only if they are committed to relocating prior to their start date and have the legal right to work in the job location.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7199,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Insurance coverage","Retirement plans"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Information Security","Backup & Disaster Recovery"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-13T05:57:54Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 104 · green card filings: 23","filings_12m":104,"filings_prev_12m":125,"green_card_filings_12m":23,"median_offered_wage_usd":173878,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-12T07:36:15+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":59}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":44,"reasons":["conf:1","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-13T07:46:16Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":284000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cohesity-research-engineer-post-training-vision-language-models","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cohesity-research-engineer-post-training-vision-language-models.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-13T07:46:16Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":16194,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-14T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":1043373},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=1043373"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcohesity-research-engineer-post-training-vision-language-models"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"free","price":{"credits":0,"usd":0},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcohesity-research-engineer-post-training-vision-language-models"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcohesity-research-engineer-post-training-vision-language-models"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/cohesity-research-engineer-post-training-vision-language-models\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcohesity-research-engineer-post-training-vision-language-models"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":4222408}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"cohesity.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":4222408},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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