Research Engineer

Moondream AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Paid parental leave

Relocation support

Job summary

Moondream AI in San Francisco is seeking a Research Engineer to design architectures, train models end-to-end, and optimize CUDA kernels for real-time video applications. The role blends research and engineering, with hands-on execution and ownership of the model lifecycle.

You will work on Python, PyTorch, and CUDA, striving for both accuracy and speed while delivering deployable results, with meaningful equity and in-person collaboration.

Qualifications

• Proven experience training models from scratch.
• Ability to implement architectures and kernels.
• Read papers and implement results quickly.

Responsibilities

• Design model architectures and train them end-to-end.
• Write kernels and optimize runtime.
• Analyze failures and iterate on experiments.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

CUDA

Tools

CUDA

Job description

Research Engineer

San Francisco, CA In-person Full-time

Most vision models are either accurate or fast. We need ours to be both, because people are running them on every frame of video in realtime. That constraint makes the work genuinely hard in a way that “scale up the cluster” doesn't solve.

We don't separate research from engineering. You design the architecture, you train it, you write the kernel that makes it actually run, you look at the failures and figure out why. The person closest to the problem makes the decision. If that sounds exhausting, it probably isn't for you. If it sounds like freedom, keep reading.

You Should Probably Apply If

• You've trained models from scratch and have opinions about why your architecture choices worked (or didn't)
• You can read a paper at breakfast and have a working implementation by dinner
• You reach for CUDA or Triton when PyTorch is leaving performance on the table, and it doesn't feel like a big deal
• You'd rather ship a model that thousands of developers deploy than publish a paper that dozens of researchers cite
• You have good taste about what experiments to run next, not just the ability to run them

You Should Definitely Not Apply If

• You want to write papers and hand off implementation to an engineering team
• You need someone to tell you what experiment to run next
• Remote work is non-negotiable (we're in-person for a reason)

Details

• Location: San Francisco, CA (in-person)
• Stack: Python, PyTorch, CUDA, and whatever else the problem demands
• Compensation: $180k–$250k + meaningful equity
• Benefits: Health, dental, vision, paid parental leave, relocation support