Staff AI Engineer, Document Understanding

LlamaIndex, Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

LlamaIndex, Inc. is seeking an experienced Member of Technical Staff in Applied Research to bridge research and engineering, focusing on document understanding and knowledge systems.

You will work on vision-language models, data curation, and production-ready experiments. You will prototype quickly, evaluate rigorously, and collaborate with engineering to move research into customer-ready solutions, handling PDFs, scanned docs, tables, and forms.

Qualifications

• 3–7 years of experience in ML engineering, applied research, or research engineering.
• Strong Python skills and comfort with modern ML tooling, especially PyTorch.
• Experience with computer vision, vision-language models, NLP, document AI, OCR, extraction, or agentic AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Develop and train vision-language models for document processing and document understanding.
• Build data pipelines for data curation, synthetic data generation, labeling, and benchmark creation.
• Evaluate base models and perform post-training or fine-tuning to hit specific performance targets.
• Improve model accuracy, latency, and cost-effectiveness across real-world document workflows.
• Design and maintain benchmarks to measure extraction quality, layout understanding, OCR performance, reasoning accuracy, and end-to-end system reliability.
• Work with messy real-world documents, including PDFs, scanned documents, tables, charts, forms, and multi-page enterprise documents.
• Collaborate with engineering to move successful research prototypes into production.
• Work directly with customers when needed to translate product requirements into benchmarks, experiments, and model improvements.
• Stay close to the latest research in vision-language models, document AI, post-training, synthetic data, and agentic systems.
• Use modern AI coding workflows and tools to move quickly.

Skills

Python

ML engineering

Benchmarking

Production-quality code

Documentation

Communication

Tools

vLLM

Pydantic

uv

ruff

mypy

Claude Code

Cursor

Job description

LlamaIndex, Inc. is seeking an experienced Member of Technical Staff in Applied Research to bridge research and engineering, focusing on document understanding and knowledge systems.

You will work on vision-language models, data curation, and production-ready experiments. You will prototype quickly, evaluate rigorously, and collaborate with engineering to move research into customer-ready solutions, handling PDFs, scanned docs, tables, and forms.