Founding Member of Technical Staff - AI Research Scientist

Sarah Smith Fund; Zürich; Hybrid; CHF 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship (where applicable)

Remote-friendly/hybrid/onsite options

Regular offsites and in-person events

Flexible PTO

Job summary

GenPeach AI in Zurich, Switzerland, is seeking an exceptional AI Research Scientist in a Leadership IC role: you will shape research direction, architect core capabilities, and mentor a small research team while collaborating with founders.

You’ll work on building large-scale diffusion and related models, design training recipes, balance speed, quality and cost, and deploy research to production with practical impact in a lean startup environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of AI research experience (industry or academia).
• Strong grasp of modern generative modeling (diffusion/flow, GANs, VLMs).
• Proficient in Python and PyTorch with production-grade code hygiene.
• Ability to drive projects end-to-end with high autonomy.

Responsibilities

• Co-design and train large-scale diffusion models for image/video generation.
• Develop training recipes (pretraining, post-training, tuning) to unlock model capabilities.
• Run rigorous ablations and report outcomes to guide roadmap decisions.
• Balance speed, quality and cost in training and production.
• Contribute to dataset strategy with curation signals and feedback loops.
• Collaborate with engineering to productionize research and ensure stability.

Skills

5+ years of AI research experience

Python

PyTorch

Research code production-grade

Fast iteration

Clear research communication

Tools

Python

PyTorch

Job description

About GenPeach AI

GenPeach AI is a product-driven research lab building vertical multimodal foundation models for hyper-realistic human generation in image and video – designed for emotionally resonant, human-centered AI experiences. Our goal is to create tools that supercharge human creativity rather than replace it.

We train models from scratch: proprietary datasets at massive scale, novel architectures and training recipes, large GPU clusters, and tight product integration so research ships to users quickly.

We are a deeply technical team of around 10 people. We’re advised by Directors from Google DeepMind and backed by leading AI-focused funds and angels from OpenAI, Meta AI, Microsoft AI, Project Prometheus, and Fal. Collectively, our team, advisors, and angels have contributed to models including Meta’s Imagine/MovieGen and foundation-model work behind OpenAI’s Sora, plus Google’s Veo and Gemini.

About the Role

We’re looking for an exceptional AI Research Scientist to help lead the next generation of GenPeach AI foundation models. This is a Leadership IC role: you’ll shape research direction through hands-on experimentation, guide technical decisions across the stack, and mentor a small group of researchers while working closely with the founders.

This isn’t “fine-tuning an open-source checkpoint.” It’s building new capabilities through architecture work, training systems, and post-training recipes—then deploying them into production.

In this role, you will

• Co-design and train large-scale diffusion models for image and video generation

• Build and iterate on training recipes (pretraining, post-training, control, preference/tuning where relevant) to unlock new model capabilities

• Run rigorous ablations: isolate what works, why it works, and communicate outcomes clearly to drive roadmap decisions

• Reason about speed/quality/cost tradeoffs and make technical choices that materially affect training efficiency and production quality

• Influence and contribute to dataset strategy: curation signals, filtering, evaluations, and feedback loops from product

• Collaborate with engineering/product to productionize research (serving constraints, stability, monitoring, fast iteration)

• Mentor and raise the bar for a small team of researchers through code, reviews, and research hygiene

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have 5+ years of deep learning / applied AI research experience (or equivalent research impact)

• Are strong in Python and PyTorch, and comfortable owning research code that becomes production-critical

• Have hands-on experience training and debugging foundation models (not “black-box use”): you’ve dealt with instability, collapse, data issues, scaling pathologies, and know how to fix them

• Can move fast with good taste: you prioritize the experiments that matter and make decisions with incomplete information

• Communicate research clearly – through writing, plots, ablations, and crisp takeaways

• Take ownership beyond your job description when needed (startup reality)

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in AI research / deep learning (industry or academia)

• Excellent grasp of modern generative modeling (e.g., diffusion/flow, GANs, VLMs or adjacent modalities)

• Strong software skills: Python + PyTorch, solid engineering hygiene for experimentation and reproducibility

• Proven ability to drive projects end-to-end with high autonomy

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience training large diffusion/flow models for image/video, or adjacent large-scale generative work (LLM/VLM/speech) with transferable scaling and post-training expertise

• Experience training at scale (multi-node, hundreds of GPUs), and understanding distributed training failure modes

• Experience designing model architectures or core training components (losses, conditioners, schedulers, sampling, distillation, etc.)

• Publications at top venues (NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR/CVPR/ICCV/ECCV/ACL) or equivalent research impact

• Experience leading technically (as an IC): mentoring, setting research direction, improving team execution

What makes this role unique

• Build frontier image/video models end-to-end: data to architecture to training to post-training to production

• High ownership and fast iteration in a lean team—your work directly shapes what we ship

• Collaboration across research and engineering with minimal process overhead

• A chance to compete on the global stage of foundation model quality—and ship results publicly

How we work

• High ownership and accountability

• Direct, low-ego communication

• Bias toward impact: measure to iterate to ship

• Strong technical standards and research discipline

Logistics

• Location: Zurich (Switzerland) or Warsaw (Poland) — onsite or hybrid. If you’re elsewhere, we’re open to remote (team/timezone fit considered).

• Compensation: competitive salary + meaningful equity (level-dependent)

• Interview process: quick screen to research round to technical round (practical + systems) to team fit/values

What we offer

• Visa sponsorship (where applicable); we’ll make a strong effort to relocate you to Switzerland or Poland if desired

• Remote-friendly: work fully remote, hybrid, or on-site from our hubs

• Regular offsites and in-person events to collaborate and connect

• Flexible PTO