Member of Technical Staff - Pretraining

Black Forest Labs; Freiburg im Breisgau; Vor Ort; EUR 85.000 - 120.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

Black Forest Labs is seeking a Staff/Senior IC in Freiburg, Germany, to lead pretraining for multimodal foundation models. The role focuses on large-scale experiments, architecture development, and cross-team initiatives. Ideal candidates will have experience shipping foundation models, a strong grasp of architecture design, and proficiency in Python and PyTorch. The position offers a hybrid work environment with in-person collaboration to foster team dynamics.

Qualifikationen

• Experience leading pretraining for foundation models that shipped to production.
• Strong intuition for architectural and objective design.
• Proficiency in deep Python and PyTorch, modifying low-level training code.

Aufgaben

• Lead large-scale pretraining experiments for multimodal foundation models.
• Develop and evaluate novel ideas across architecture and training algorithms.
• Contribute across the full stack including low-level GPU optimizations.

Kenntnisse

Large-scale distributed training

Python

PyTorch

Visual generative models

Jobbeschreibung

Why This Role

We're building the foundation models that power the next wave of visual intelligence — and pretraining is where that work begins. This role sits at the center of our research effort. You'll shape training objectives, architectures, data strategies, and systems behind our joint image, video, and audio foundation models, with a direct line from your research to products used by millions.

This is a Staff / Senior IC role. We're looking for someone who has already led pretraining at the frontier and wants to do it again.

What You'll Work On

• Lead large-scale pretraining experiments for our multimodal (image, video, audio) foundation models (architecture, objective functions, scaling strategies)
• Develop and evaluate novel ideas across architecture, optimizers, and training algorithms.
• Contribute across the full stack: low‑level GPU and systems optimizations, research code, and high‑level model design
• Lead focused research projects independently and drive larger cross‑team initiatives

What We're Looking For

• You've led or co‑owned pretraining for a foundation model (image, video, LLM, or multimodal) that shipped to production or a major release
• Own architectural calls that move the model: attention patterns, modulation schemes, loss formulations, tokenization strategies
• Deep experience with large-scale distributed training: FSDP/TP/PP, multi-node runs at 500+ GPUs, debugging loss spikes, NaNs, throughput regressions, and silent correctness issues at scale
• Strong intuition for architecture and objective design — you've made calls on attention patterns, modulation schemes, or loss formulations that moved a real model
• Track record of shipping: top‑venue publications (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV) paired with production impact, or unambiguous production wins at a frontier lab
• Deep Python and PyTorch proficiency; comfortable reading and modifying low‑level training code
• Familiarity with visual generative models is a must

How We Work Together

We’re a distributed team with real offices that people actually use. Depending on your role, you’ll either join us in Freiburg or SF at least 2 days a week (or one full week every other week), or work remotely with a monthly in‑person week to stay connected. We’ll cover reasonable travel costs to make this possible. We think in‑person time matters, and we’ve structured things to make it accessible to all. We’ll discuss what this will look like for the role during our interview process.