AI Model Distillation & Efficiency Lead

Waabi; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 195,000 - 286,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation and equity

Health and Wellness benefits (Medical,

Unlimited Vacation

Flexible hours and Work from Home

Daily drinks, snacks and meals

Team building events

Open-ended growth

Job summary

Waabi is seeking a Distillation Lead to own strategy and execution for model distillation across its AI stack, ensuring compressed models meet real-time onboard and high-throughput simulation needs. You will lead partnerships with ML Platform, Infrastructure, Onboard Autonomy, and Simulation teams to deliver efficient models.

You will mentor researchers and engineers, champion best practices for model compression, and stay at the cutting edge of efficiency research with publications and

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience designing and implementing distillation, quantization, pruning, and model compression techniques for large-scale neural networks.
• Expert Python and PyTorch (or JAX) skills with experience in large-scale distributed training.
• Technical leadership: setting direction and driving projects from concept to production.
• Cross-functional collaboration with infrastructure, platform and autonomy teams.
• Clear communication of complex trade-offs to diverse audiences.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical strategy for model distillation and compression across Waabi's AI stack — spanning perception, world models, and planning.
• Design, implement, and scale distillation and efficiency pipelines for onboard deployment and simulation use-cases.
• Collaborate with ML Platform, Infrastructure, Onboard, Autonomy, and Simulation teams to integrate compressed models into production pipelines.
• Define benchmarks and evaluation frameworks to characterize efficiency vs. quality across models and hardware targets.
• Mentor researchers and engineers, setting a high technical bar and fostering rigorous experimentation.
• Disseminate knowledge through design reviews, documentation, and internal talks.

Skills

Distillation

Quantization

Pruning

Model compression

Python

PyTorch

Leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Master's or PhD in ML/CV/Robotics

Tools

TensorRT

ONNX

CUDA

Job description

Waabi is seeking a Distillation Lead to own strategy and execution for model distillation across its AI stack, ensuring compressed models meet real-time onboard and high-throughput simulation needs. You will lead partnerships with ML Platform, Infrastructure, Onboard Autonomy, and Simulation teams to deliver efficient models.

You will mentor researchers and engineers, champion best practices for model compression, and stay at the cutting edge of efficiency research with publications and