Efficient AI Researcher (Contract)

LG Electronics; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 239,702,400 - 261,744,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

401(k) with company match

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

LG Electronics Emerging Technology Lab in Santa Clara, CA seeks a Contract AI Researcher - Efficient AI to advance AI efficiency for on-device deployment. You will explore model compression, quantization, efficient inference, and architectures to speed up LLM/VLM workloads on constrained hardware.

Bridging research and implementation, you will prototype working systems, publish results, and collaborate with seasoned researchers to deliver measurable improvements for LG's future products

Qualifications

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Machine Learning, Mathematics, or a related technical field. Relevant post-graduate research and/or industry experience is preferred but not required.
• Research or engineering experience in ML, efficient AI, model optimization, or AI systems.
• Strong programming ability in Python and experience with PyTorch or a comparable deep learning framework.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLMs, SLMs, VLMs, multimodal models, or generative AI systems.
• Ability to read research papers, implement technical methods, run experiments, and communicate results clearly.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving and ambiguous technical environment.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for reports, presentations, demos, and technical documentation.

Responsibilities

• Research, prototype, and implement AI methods that improve model efficiency, inference performance, and deployment feasibility on constrained devices.
• Optimize modern LLMs, SLMs, VLMs, multimodal models, and agentic workloads across post-training, inference, and deployment workflows.
• Propose and evaluate novel compression methods (PTQ, QAT, pruning, low-rank approximation, etc) for on-device LLM/VLM enablement.
• Devise approaches to address challenges related to long-context inference and KV cache compression in the context of reasoning and agentic applications.
• Develop gradient-free and backpropagation-free methods for model merging, compression, and efficiency-driven optimization.
• Implement and evaluate emerging efficient architectures and modules, including MoE, SSMs, hybrid models, Looped Transformers, etc.
• Prototype inference-time optimization methods such as speculative decoding, constrained decoding, low-latency generation, and kernel-level optimization.
• Build experimental pipelines, perform evaluations on standardized language, vision, reasoning, and agentic benchmarks.
• Contribute to publications, technical reports, open-source releases, invention disclosures, and IP submissions where appropriate.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

LLMs

SLMs

VLMs

Multimodal models

Generative AI

Research experience

Communication skills

Education

M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Machine Learning, Mathematics, or a related technical field.

Tools

PyTorch

llama.cpp

GGUF

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

Job description

LG Electronics Emerging Technology Lab in Santa Clara, CA seeks a Contract AI Researcher - Efficient AI to advance AI efficiency for on-device deployment. You will explore model compression, quantization, efficient inference, and architectures to speed up LLM/VLM workloads on constrained hardware.

Bridging research and implementation, you will prototype working systems, publish results, and collaborate with seasoned researchers to deliver measurable improvements for LG's future products