Research Scientist - Vision Language Model

Institute of Foundation Models; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 450,000; Full time

Job summary

The Institute of Foundation Models in Sunnyvale, California is seeking a Research Scientist for their Vision Language Model team. This role involves advancing state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models and developing large-scale systems combining visual understanding and reasoning.

Qualified candidates will have a PhD in a relevant field and strong Python/PyTorch skills. Responsibilities include research, architecture development, and mentoring junior researchers while contributing to impactful AI solutions.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent in relevant fields.
• Experience with large-scale model optimization.
• Strong research and problem-solving abilities.

Responsibilities

• Research next-generation Vision Language Models.
• Develop novel training methodologies.
• Contribute to research publications and technical reports.

Skills

Python programming

PyTorch development

Large language models

Vision-language models

Multimodal datasets

Deep learning architectures

Problem-solving

Communication skills

Education

PhD in Machine Learning or equivalent research

Tools

Distributed training systems

CUDA

Job description

About the Institute of Foundation Models

We are a dedicated research lab for building, understanding, using, and risk-managing foundation models. Our mandate is to advance research, nurture the next generation of AI builders, and drive transformative contributions to a knowledge-driven economy.

As part of our team, you’ll have the opportunity to work on the core of cutting-edge foundation model training, alongside world-class researchers, data scientists, and engineers, tackling the most fundamental and impactful challenges in AI development. You will participate in the development of groundbreaking AI solutions that have the potential to reshape entire industries. Strategic and innovative problem-solving skills will be instrumental in establishing MBZUAI as a global hub for high-performance computing in deep learning, driving impactful discoveries that inspire the next generation of AI pioneers.

Position Summary

As a Research Scientist in the Vision Language Model (VLM) team, your role will be central to advancing state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models that integrate visual understanding, reasoning, and agentic capabilities. You will work on the research and development of large-scale VLM systems, spanning model architectures, data recipes for pre-training and post-training, and evaluation benchmarks. The role combines cutting-edge research with practical engineering, emphasizing large-scale data processing, filtering, and weighting pipelines, distributed training systems, and reinforcement learning algorithms and systems for multimodal reasoning and agent development.

Key Responsibilities

• Research and development of next-generation Vision Language Models across pre-training, instruction tuning, reasoning, and agents.
• Develop novel architectures and training methodologies for integrating visual understanding, language reasoning, and tool-use capabilities.
• Research efficient multimodal learning techniques, including data-efficient training, long-context modeling, model modularity, and inference optimization.
• Build and improve large-scale multimodal datasets, synthetic data generation pipelines, and evaluation benchmarks for VLM capabilities.
• Investigate multimodal reasoning, agentic behavior, OCR, grounding, document understanding, chart understanding, and visual question answering capabilities.
• Contribute to technical reports, research publications, and open-source software.
• Represent MBZUAI at research conferences and industry events, showcasing advancements in multimodal foundation models and large-scale AI systems.
• Mentor junior researchers and collaborate across teams to drive impactful research initiatives.

Academic Qualifications

PhD or equivalent research experience in Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, or Multimodal AI.

$150,000 - $450,000 a year

Professional Experience

Minimum

• Experience working with large language models and/or vision-language models, including pre-training, fine-tuning, evaluation, or inference.
• Strong Python and PyTorch development skills for large-scale machine learning research.
• Experience with distributed training systems and large-scale model optimization.
• Familiarity with multimodal datasets and data processing pipelines involving images, text, and video.
• Understanding of modern deep learning architectures, including Transformers, attention mechanisms, and multimodal fusion techniques.
• Experience with ML infrastructure, including model evaluation, debugging, optimization, and large-scale experimentation.
• Problem-solving and research skills with the ability to independently drive research/engineering projects.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills for working across research and engineering teams.

Preferred Skills

• Hands-on experience training or fine-tuning large Vision Language Models or multimodal foundation models at scale.
• Experience with distributed learning frameworks and infrastructure such as PyTorch Distributed, Megatron, Triton, or CUDA.
• Research experience in multimodal reasoning, agentic systems, tool use, OCR, grounding, document understanding, or multimodal retrieval.
• Experience with synthetic data generation, multimodal data curation, or automated evaluation frameworks for VLMs.
• Familiarity with efficient training and inference techniques such as FlashAttention, quantization, tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, or memory optimization.
• Experience contributing to open-source ML software and large-scale research codebases.
• Strong publication record in leading AI conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, or related venues.
• Experience collaborating across research, infrastructure, and product-oriented teams to deliver state-of-the-art multimodal systems.