Lead AI Researcher — Build Scalable Multimodal Video AI

Opus; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

OpusClip is seeking a hands-on Lead AI Researcher to drive production ML at scale, with strong depth in model post-training, evaluation, and feedback-driven improvement. You will mentor engineers, define the technical roadmap, and balance performance with infra costs.

Based in Mountain View, CA, you will apply LLMs and multimodal models to video tasks like highlight detection and content curation, influencing product decisions and roadmap.

Qualifications

• Proven experience shipping AI/ML models from prototype to production at scale.
• Expertise in model post-training, fine-tuning, and learning from user feedback.
• Experience building data flywheels turning feedback into training data.
• Inference optimization experience for self-hosted models including latency and cost.
• Strong evaluation skills: offline benchmarks, online experiments, product metrics.
• Applied LLMs or multimodal models to video applications (highlight detection, ranking, editing).
• Familiarity with video models: vision-language, ASR, video understanding and upscaling.
• Able to decide build-vs-buy across APIs, open-source, and internal models.
• Capable of setting roadmap, mentoring engineers, and leading a small AI team.
• Product-focused: balance model quality, latency, reliability, and infra cost.

Responsibilities

• Lead AI research initiatives from ideation to deployment at scale.
• Mentor engineers and manage a small high-performing AI team.
• Define technical roadmap and review architecture and systems.
• Balance quality, latency, reliability, and costs in production.
• Apply AI/ML to video workflows such as curation and editing decisions.

Skills

Production ML

Model evaluation

Inference optimization

Roadmap planning

Team leadership

Product-focused

Tools

Self-hosted models

GPU optimization

Quantization

Vision-language models

ASR/transcription

Job description

OpusClip is seeking a hands-on Lead AI Researcher to drive production ML at scale, with strong depth in model post-training, evaluation, and feedback-driven improvement. You will mentor engineers, define the technical roadmap, and balance performance with infra costs.

Based in Mountain View, CA, you will apply LLMs and multimodal models to video tasks like highlight detection and content curation, influencing product decisions and roadmap.