RESEARCHER, EFFICIENT INFERENCE

MLSys 2020; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

MLSys 2020 in San Francisco is looking for a Senior Researcher specialized in machine learning efficiency. The role involves designing and researching methods for quantization, speculative decoding, and other efficiency techniques, ensuring that research translates into production.

The ideal candidate will have over 5 years of experience in related fields, strong statistical expertise, and proficiency in tools like PyTorch or Jax. Join our small team for impactful work on autonomous research agents.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on research experience in machine learning.
• Strong understanding of training and inference performance.
• Experience in translating research into production.

Responsibilities

• Research and develop quantization methods.
• Design and evaluate speculative decoding approaches.
• Investigate training-time efficiency methods.
• Run controlled experiments at production scale.
• Co-design methods with inference engineering.

Skills

Machine Learning Research

Quantization

Speculative Decoding

Distillation

Efficient Algorithms

Statistical Expertise

Written Communication

Education

PhD in ML or related field

Tools

PyTorch

Jax

Job description

ABOUT THE COMPANY

We're building autonomous research agents for recursive self-improvement (multi-agent systems that propose, run, and analyze machine learning experiments). We're a small team based in San Francisco, on-site

ABOUT THE ROLE

You'll be researching making models efficient: quantization, speculative decoding, sparse and structured attention, distillation, mixture-of-experts inference, and the training-time techniques that make those methods possible. The work spans algorithm design, careful evaluation, and pushing methods to where they actually run.

This is a senior research role with a clear engineering edge. You'll spend time at the intersection of model architecture and inference performance, designing methods that move accuracy/latency/cost trade-offs in our favor (then partnering with engineers to make those wins real in production).

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Research and develop quantization methods: post-training quantization, quantization-aware training, mixed-precision regimes, low-bit-width arithmetic
• Design and evaluate speculative decoding approaches: draft models, tree attention, parallel speculation, lookahead decoding
• Investigate training-time efficiency methods that compose well with inference: distillation, sparse attention, mixture-of-experts, low-rank adaptation, pruning
• Run controlled experiments at production scale; characterize what works on real workloads, not just toy benchmarks
• Co‑design methods with the inference engineering team: push results to where they actually run, not stop at the paper
• Read deeply across the efficient ML / efficient inference literature; translate the most useful ideas into our stack
• Publish when the work warrants it; share findings internally
• Partner with model and training researchers so efficiency choices align with model architecture and post‑training decisions

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• Strong track record of ML research on efficiency methods: quantization, speculative decoding, distillation, MoE, sparse attention, or adjacent
• 5+ years of hands‑on research experience
• Deep familiarity with both training and inference performance characteristics
• Fluent in PyTorch, Jax or equivalent; comfortable working at the kernel and serving‑framework level when methods require it
• Track record of moving efficiency research from prototype to production
• Strong statistical expertise: you'd notice a flawed comparison before someone else points it out
• Strong written communication
• Published research at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, MLSys, or comparable venues

NICE TO HAVE

• PhD in ML, systems, or related field
• Open‑source contributions to quantization, speculative‑decoding, or efficient‑inference libraries
• Experience with hardware‑aware optimization and accelerator‑specific tooling
• Background in numerical methods, low‑precision arithmetic, or approximate computation

THIS ROLE IS PROBABLY NOT FOR YOU IF

• You want to focus on pretraining large models from scratch (that's a different role)
• You prefer abstract algorithmic research without hands‑on implementation
• You want a fixed benchmark with stable targets (our targets shift with what our models actually need to do)