Research Scientist - Vision Foundation Models

Epsilon Labs, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Epsilon Labs, Inc. in San Francisco seeks a Research Scientist specializing in vision foundation models for medical imaging. You will design, train, and scale encoders for radiology data (X-ray, CT, MRI) and extend 2D pretraining to volumetric 3D data, balancing performance with clinical deployment requirements.

You will collaborate with ML Research to drive state-of-the-art architectures, perform rigorous evaluations, and contribute to publications and production-ready code.

Qualifications

• > 6+ years in computer vision / ML
• Experience with vision encoder models at scale (ViT, ConvNeXt)
• Experience with volumetric or spatiotemporal data (3D medical imaging)
• Proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks (PyTorch/JAX)
• Experience with medical imaging contexts (radiology)

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and scale vision foundation models for radiology across X-ray, CT, MRI.
• Extend 2D pretraining to volumetric CT/MR data addressing long sequences and anisotropy.
• Evaluate model performance on academic benchmarks and production data.
• Contribute to dataset curation, architecture design, distributed training, and deployment.
• Stay current with CV and medical imaging research and best practices.
• Publish and share technical insights through blogs and conferences.

Skills

Vision foundation models

Self-supervised pretraining

Contrastive learning

Masked image modeling

JEPA objectives

Volumetric 3D medical imaging

PyTorch

JAX

Distributed training

Clinical deployment

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Multi-GPU training

Job description

About Us

We're tackling one of healthcare's most critical challenges in medical imaging and diagnostics. Our company operates at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and clinical practice, building technology that directly impacts patient outcomes. We've assembled one of the industry's most comprehensive and diverse medical imaging datasets and have a proven product-market fit with a substantial customer pipeline already in place.

Role Overview

We're seeking a Research Scientist with deep expertise in vision foundation models to join our ML Research team. You'll be at the forefront of developing and deploying state-of-the-art vision models for medical imaging applications. This role focuses on pretraining and scaling vision encoders for radiology diagnosis across X-ray, CT, and MRI, with a growing emphasis on 3D volumetric modeling. You'll work with one of the largest and most diverse medical imaging datasets in the industry, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in AI-assisted diagnosis while maintaining the rigor required for clinical deployment.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, train, and scale vision foundation models for radiology applications across X-ray, CT, and MRI modalities, implementing self-supervised, contrastive, masked image modeling, and joint-embedding predictive (JEPA) frameworks.

• Extend 2D pretraining recipes to volumetric CT and MR data, addressing long sequence lengths, anisotropic spacing, and multi-sequence studies.

• Evaluate model performance rigorously across academic benchmarks, internal offline datasets, and live production data.

• Contribute hands-on to all stages of model development including dataset curation, architecture design, distributed training, and production deployment.

• Stay current with cutting-edge research in computer vision and medical imaging AI.

• Drive research and technical excellence through conference publications and technical blog posts, establishing best practices for training robust medical imaging models at scale.
  

Qualifications

• 6+ years of academia/industry experience in computer vision/machine learning

• Deep expertise in training vision encoder models at scale (e.g. ViT, ConvNeXt). Strong foundation in self-supervised pretraining, including contrastive, masked image modeling, self-distillation, and JEPA-style objectives.

• Experience training on volumetric or spatiotemporal data (video, 3D medical imaging)

• Track record of implementing complex models from research papers and adapting them to new domains

• Proficiency in PyTorch or JAX, with experience training models on multi-GPU/distributed systems

• Hands-on experience with medical imaging applications, particularly radiology (X-ray, CT, MRI)

• Strong software engineering skills and ability to write production-quality code
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Publications at top-tier conferences (CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, MICCAI)

• Experience with 3D medical image processing and retrieval tasks

• Familiarity with CT and MR acquisition (windowing, multi-sequence protocols, voxel spacing)

• Experience with long-context training techniques (sequence parallelism, efficient attention)

• Knowledge of vision-language models and multimodal learning

• Experience with model interpretability and explainability methods

• Understanding of clinical evaluation metrics, clinical workflows, and healthcare data (DICOM, HL7, etc.)