Machine Learning Engineer (Vision)

Job Description

About Zyphra

At Zyphra, we're building Maia—a cutting-edge multimodal agent system that combines advanced research in neural network architectures, long-term memory, and reinforcement learning. Based in Palo Alto, our team brings together talent from leading AI organizations including Google DeepMind, Anthropic, StabilityAI, Qualcomm, Neuralink, Nvidia, and Apple.

Machine Learning Engineer (Vision)

About this role:

You will be a core contributor on Zyphra’s Vision Team building the next generation of vision-language models which can understand natural scenes with a focus on web, desktop, and mobile UIs. You will be deeply involved in the entire model training process from data gathering and processing to designing novel architectures and training methodologies. You will work across:

Large-scale vision encoder and vision language training runs

Performance optimization of our training stack

Image and video dataset collection, processing, and evaluation

Architecture and training methodology ablations and improvements

While deep expertise in all areas isn't required, you should be enthusiastic about learning each aspect as needed to drive our models forward. We also strongly look for velocity over position. However, having deep expertise in at least one of the above is helpful to begin contributing immediately.

Requirements:

Strong research taste and intuition. The ability to work through a research project from conception to execution to write-up.

Strong implementation and prototyping ability – can take an idea from conception to experimentation extremely quickly.

The ability to work well and cooperate with others in a high-paced research setting.

Good to have:

Experience with training and evaluating vision language models

Experience with creating and collecting large scale machine learning datasets, especially in the visual modality

Experience with training vision encoders using contrastive learning or other methods

Experience with supervised finetuning and preference learning methods as well as reinforcement learning methods

A good intuitive ability to understand model behaviours and correct them through iterative finetuning.

Interest in grappling in detail with data and spending significant time involved in data engineering and synthetic data generation

Postgraduate degree in scientific subject (Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Machine Learning, etc)

Previously published machine learning research in well-respected venues

Highly proficient with Pytorch and Python

Are excited and able to rapidly learn new fields and implement new ideas

Excellent communication and collaboration skills and can work effectively on both research and engineering implementation at scale.

Culture:

Our research methodology is to make grounded, methodical steps toward ambitious goals. Both deep research and engineering excellence are equally valued

We strongly value new and crazy ideas and are very willing to bet big on new ideas

We move as quickly as we can; we aim to make the bar to impact as low as possible

We all enjoy what we do and love discussing AI

Benefits and Perks:

Medical, dental, vision and FSA plans

Competitive salary, equity and 401(k)

Relocation and immigration support on a case-by-case basis

On-site meals prepared by a dedicated culinary team; Thursday Happy Hours

General requirements:

Willing to be in-person in our office in Palo Alto

US authorization to work. We will consider O1 visa sponsorship for the right candidate

Full-time