AI Researcher — Distillation

About the Role

We’re looking for an AI Researcher focused on model distillation to help us push the frontier of efficient, high-performance models. You’ll work on turning large, expensive models into smaller, faster, and more deployable systems-while maintaining or improving quality.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys publishing research, working close to real systems, and seeing their ideas move from papers → code → production.

What You’ll Work On

• Design and evaluate model distillation techniques (teacher-student training, self-distillation, layer-wise distillation, representation matching, etc.)

• Research tradeoffs between model size, latency, memory, and accuracy

• Develop novel distillation approaches for:

  • Large language models

  • Long-context or specialized architectures

  • Inference-constrained environments

• Run large-scale experiments and ablations; analyze results rigorously

• Collaborate with engineers to productionize research outcomes

• Write and submit research papers to top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, COLM, etc.)

• Contribute to internal research notes, technical blogs, and open-source projects when appropriate

What We’re Looking For

Required

• Strong background in machine learning research

• Hands-on experience with model distillation or closely related topics (compression, pruning, quantization, representation learning)

• Publication experience (conference or journal papers, workshop papers, or arXiv preprints)

• Solid understanding of deep learning fundamentals (optimization, training dynamics, generalization)

• Fluency in PyTorch (or equivalent) and research-grade experimentation

• Ability to clearly communicate research ideas, results, and limitations

Nice to Have

• Experience distilling large language models

• Work on efficiency-focused research (latency, memory, throughput)

• Experience with long-context models or non-Transformer architectures

• Open-source contributions in ML or research tooling

• Prior startup or applied research experience

Why Join Us

• Real ownership over research direction at a Series A stage

• Strong support for publishing and open research

• Tight feedback loop between research and real-world deployment

• Access to meaningful compute and production-scale problems

• Small, highly technical team with deep ML and systems expertise

Example Backgrounds

• ML researchers from academia transitioning to industry

• Research engineers with published work in model efficiency

• PhD / Post-doc graduates or industry researchers who still want to publish