Applied Research Scientist / Engineer

lumalabs-ai; New York (NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 450,000; Full time

Job summary

Luma AI in New York seeks a full-time senior applied researcher to refine and deploy video foundation models. You’ll work at the intersection of research, product, and partnerships to turn state-of-the-art techniques into practical capabilities for creative workflows.

You will drive controllability, personalization, and evaluation across modeling, data, and systems, partnering with design and product to translate user intent into robust model behavior and intuitive controls.

Qualifications

• Strong ML fundamentals with deep experience in visual generative models (diffusion/transformers or related architectures).
• Ideal candidates have expertise in fine-tuning, personalization, domain adaptation, data curation, or interpretability.
• Hands-on Python and DL engineering skills, comfortable moving between research prototypes and production systems.

Responsibilities

• Refine, personalize, and deploy video foundation models across modeling, data, systems, and evaluation.
• Develop and maintain model variants for user environments and creative partners.
• Define success metrics and build user-aligned evaluations to ensure fidelity and reliability.
• Collaborate with product, research, and design to translate creative intent into production-ready controls.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Research

Production Systems

Education

PhD in ML/CS

Tools

Ray

Kubernetes

Slurm

Job description

About Luma AI

Luma's mission is to build multimodal AI to expand human imagination and capabilities. We believe that multimodality is critical for intelligence. To go beyond language models and build more aware, capable, and useful systems, the next step function change will come from vision. So, we are working on training and scaling up multimodal foundation models for systems that can see and understand, show and explain, and eventually interact with our world to effect change.

About the Role

This is a foundational opportunity to refine, personalize, and build the final capabilities and control interface of Luma’s foundation models and drive real-world value.

You’ll sit at the intersection of research, product, and partnerships, helping close the gap between state-of-the-art and production-ready. Your mission is to make our video foundation models more expressive, controllable, and personalized – solving the “last mile” challenges demanded by top-tier creative workflows.

What You’ll Do

You will work as a fullstack applied researcher across modeling, data, systems, and evaluation to adapt and deploy models to production.

• Controllability and Features: You will leverage a toolkit spanning SFT, RL, personalization, distillation, control adapters, and more, to develop and maintain model variants purpose-built for user environments and creative partners.
• Personalization: Architect the data engine for rapid adaptation. You will leverage proprietary, vertical-specific datasets to create specialized finetunes and improve future training recipes, ensuring our models rely on data that reflects real-world use cases.
• End-User Quality: You will define and drive end-user quality – setting success metrics, building user-aligned evaluations, and iterating on the model/data/evals loop to meetstrict fidelity and reliability targets in specific enterprise verticals.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Product, Research, and Design to translate creative intent and user feedback into model behavior, intuitive controls, and production-ready capabilities for users and partners.

Who You Are

• Product-Obsessed Researcher/Engineer: You treat end users and partners as collaborators and enjoy solving specific “last mile” problems—not just optimizing public metrics.
• ML Expert: Strong ML fundamentals with deep experience in visual generative models (diffusion/transformers or related architectures). Ideal candidates also have a deep understanding of at least one: fine-tuning, personalization, domain adaptation, data curation, targeted distillation, interpretability, or human-feedback-driven refinement.
• Hands-On Builder: Strong Python and deep learning engineering skills (ideally PyTorch), comfortable moving between research prototypes and production systems.

Bonus Points

• Contributions to state-of-the-art models in image/video generation.
• Experience collaborating with creative partners (VFX, animation, film, design tools).
• Track record building workflows/tools that materially improve iteration speed and evaluation rigor.
• Familiarity with large-scale training infrastructure and distributed systems (Ray, Slurm, Kubernetes).

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $200,000 – $450,000 per year.