Staff AI Engineer - Vision-Language & Document AI

Neura Market; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

LlamaIndex is seeking an AI Research Engineer to join the document understanding team, bridging applied research and engineering. You will work on vision-language models, document processing, data curation, synthetic data generation, benchmarking, training, and post-training to improve accuracy, speed, and cost in production.

This role emphasizes delivering production-ready research, prototyping quickly, evaluating rigorously, and collaborating with engineering to deploy improvements that

Qualifications

• 3–7 years of experience in ML engineering, applied research, or research engineering.
• Hands-on benchmarking and training of models.
• Strong Python skills and PyTorch proficiency.
• Experience with vision-language models, OCR, NLP, or document AI.
• Ability to iterate quickly and produce production-ready code.
• Comfort in a fast-paced startup with high ownership.

Responsibilities

• Develop and train vision-language models for document processing and 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 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 (PDFs, scans, tables, forms, multi-page docs).
• Collaborate with engineering to move successful research prototypes into production.
• Work directly with customers to translate requirements into benchmarks and experiments.
• Stay close to latest research in vision-language models and document AI.
• Use modern AI coding workflows and tools to move quickly.

Skills

ML engineering

Applied research

Python

PyTorch

Vision-language models

NLP / OCR

Experimentation

Software engineering

Tools

vLLM

Pydantic

ruff

mypy

CUDA

Job description

LlamaIndex is seeking an AI Research Engineer to join the document understanding team, bridging applied research and engineering. You will work on vision-language models, document processing, data curation, synthetic data generation, benchmarking, training, and post-training to improve accuracy, speed, and cost in production.

This role emphasizes delivering production-ready research, prototyping quickly, evaluating rigorously, and collaborating with engineering to deploy improvements that