Contract AI Researcher: Efficient AI for On-Device LLMs

LG Electronics North America; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 84,130 - 91,340; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

No-cost health premiums for you and 1+

401(k) retirement plan with company-m

Paid time off and holidays

Short-term incentives

Mental health resources

Parental leave

Group life and disability insurance

Job summary

LG Electronics is seeking a Contract AI Researcher for the Emerging Technology Lab in Santa Clara, CA. The role focuses on making LLMs, VLMs, and multimodal AI faster, smaller, and more deployable on edge devices.

Work spans compression, quantization, efficient inference, and novel architectures, with collaboration across research and application teams. One-year contract with hybrid arrangements and opportunities to contribute to IP and publications.

Qualifications

• MS/PhD in CS/CE/ML/Math or related field; post‑grad research or industry experience preferred.
• Experience in ML, efficient AI, model optimization, or AI systems.
• Strong Python programming and PyTorch experience.
• Hands‑on work with modern LLMs/SLMs/VLMs or generative AI systems.
• Ability to read research papers, implement methods, run experiments, and report results clearly.
• Comfortable in fast, ambiguous environments; strong communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Research and prototype AI methods to improve model efficiency and deployment on constrained devices.
• Optimize LLMs/SLMs/VLMs and multimodal workloads across post‑training, inference, and deployment.
• Develop and evaluate compression methods for on‑device LLM/VLM enablement.
• Address long‑context inference and KV cache challenges for reasoning and agentic apps.
• Explore gradient‑free and backpropagation‑free optimization techniques and model merging.
• Prototype efficient architectures (MoE, SSMs, hybrid attention, Looped Transformers).
• Build pipelines and evaluate on language, vision, reasoning benchmarks; contribute to IP/publications.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

ML

Research

Education

MS/PhD in CS/CE/ML/Math

Tools

llama.cpp

GGUF

vLLM

Job description

LG Electronics is seeking a Contract AI Researcher for the Emerging Technology Lab in Santa Clara, CA. The role focuses on making LLMs, VLMs, and multimodal AI faster, smaller, and more deployable on edge devices.

Work spans compression, quantization, efficient inference, and novel architectures, with collaboration across research and application teams. One-year contract with hybrid arrangements and opportunities to contribute to IP and publications.