Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Vision

United States Digital Space LLC; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 350,000 - 850,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Generous vacation and parental leave

Flexible working hours

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC in New York is seeking experienced research engineers with a solid background in computer vision. This collaborative role involves research, development, and evaluation focused on enhancing the capabilities of state-of-the-art Claude models in visual and spatial tasks.

Applicants should have over 7 years of experience in machine learning and computer vision, familiarity with training large-scale models, and a passion for impactful AI research. The position offers competitive annual compensation ranging from $350,000 to $850,000, reflecting the degree of expertise required for the role.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of ML, computer vision, and software engineering experience.
• Familiar with architecture of large vision language models.
• Experience in creating and evaluating training datasets.

Responsibilities

• Run experiments to improve Claude's vision.
• Develop tools for visual input reasoning.
• Create benchmarks for multimodal capabilities.

Skills

Machine Learning

Computer Vision

Software Engineering

Collaborative skills

Results-oriented

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

JAX

PyTorch

Job description

About the company

the company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

We’re looking for research engineers with a strong computer vision background who believe that visual and spatial reasoning are core to fully unlocking the capabilities of LLMs. In this role, you'll work on research, development, and evaluation for state-of-the-art Claude models, with a focus on visual and spatial capabilities. This role is highly collaborative and will touch many aspects of our broader research efforts, taking a full-stack approach across pretraining, RL, and runtime techniques like agentic harnesses. Additionally, you’ll partner with the product org to ensure that the vision improvements you deliver impact Claude’s performance on real-world tasks.

What you'll do:

• Run experiments to evaluate architectural variants, data strategies, and SL and RL techniques to improve Claude’s vision
• Develop and test tools, skills, and agentic infrastructure that enable Claude to reason over visual inputs
• Create evaluations and benchmarks that measure progress on multimodal capabilities across training and deployment
• Work with our product org to find solutions to our most vexing API customer challenges related to vision and spatial reasoning

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have 7+ years of ML, computer vision, and software engineering experience through industry, academia, or other projects
• Are familiar with the architecture, training, and operation of large vision language models
• Have experience creating and evaluating large synthetic and real-world visual training datasets
• Have experience engaging in systematic prompting, finetuning, or evaluation
• Are results-oriented, with a bias towards flexibility and impact
• Enjoy pair programming and cross-team collaboration
• Care about the societal impacts of your work

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Large-scale pretraining, SL, and RL on language models
• Deep learning research on images, video, or other modalities
• Developing complex agentic systems using LLMs
• High-performance ML systems (GPUs, TPUs, JAX, PyTorch)
• Large-scale ETL and data pipeline development

Representative projects:

• Running experiments to determine ideal training datamixes and parameters for a synthetically generated vision dataset
• Finetuning Claude to maximize its performance using a particular set of agent tools/skills
• Building a pipeline to ingest and process a novel source of visual training data
• Designing and running experiments to evaluate the scalability of two architectural variants

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

Annual Salary: $350,000—$850,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team. Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that the company recruiters only contact you from@the company.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of the company. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate the company recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit the company.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At the company we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to the company, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

the company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Can