Applied AI Research Engineer - Document Understanding

LlamaIndex, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

LlamaIndex, Inc. is seeking an AI Research Engineer to join the document understanding team in San Francisco. You will work between research and engineering to develop vision-language models for document processing, build data pipelines, and benchmark systems used by customers.

You will prototype quickly, evaluate rigorously, and help translate promising approaches into production-ready solutions that improve accuracy, latency, and cost in real-world workflows.

Qualifications

• 3–7 years of ML engineering or research experience.
• Strong Python skills and PyTorch experience.
• Experience with CV, vision-language, NLP, or OCR.
• Ability to build experiments and iterate quickly.
• Production-quality code and good engineering judgment.

Responsibilities

• Develop and train vision-language models for document processing.
• Build data pipelines for data curation, labeling, and benchmarks.
• Evaluate models and perform post-training or fine-tuning.
• Improve accuracy, latency, and cost in production.
• Collaborate to move research prototypes into production.
• Work with customers to translate requirements into benchmarks.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Vision-language

NLP

Experimentation

Engineering judgment

Production code

Tools

vLLM

Pydantic

uv

ruff

mypy

Claude Code

Cursor

Job description

LlamaIndex, Inc. is seeking an AI Research Engineer to join the document understanding team in San Francisco. You will work between research and engineering to develop vision-language models for document processing, build data pipelines, and benchmark systems used by customers.

You will prototype quickly, evaluate rigorously, and help translate promising approaches into production-ready solutions that improve accuracy, latency, and cost in real-world workflows.