Member of Technical Staff - Pretraining

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

• Lead large-scale pretraining experiments for our multimodal (image, video, audio) foundation models (architecture, objective functions, scaling strategies)
• Develop and evaluate novel ideas across architecture, optimizers, and training algorithms.
• Contribute across the full stack: low-level GPU and systems optimizations, research code, and high-level model design
• Lead focused research projects independently and drive larger cross-team initiatives

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• You've led or co-owned pretraining for a foundation model (image, video, LLM, or multimodal) that shipped to production or a major release
• Own architectural calls that move the model: attention patterns, modulation schemes, loss formulations, tokenization strategies
• Deep experience with large-scale distributed training: FSDP/TP/PP, multi-node runs at 500+ GPUs, debugging loss spikes, NaNs, throughput regressions, and silent correctness issues at scale
• Strong intuition for architecture and objective design — you've made calls on attention patterns, modulation schemes, or loss formulations that moved a real model
• Track record of shipping: top-venue publications (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV) paired with production impact, or unambiguous production wins at a frontier lab
• Deep Python and PyTorch proficiency; comfortable reading and modifying low-level training code
• Familiarity with visual generative models is a must

HOW WE WORK TOGETHER

We’re a distributed team with real offices that people actually use. This role is based in Freiburg, and you’ll join us in the office at least 2 days a week, or one full week every other week.

EVERYTHING WE DO IS GROUNDED IN FOUR VALUES:

• Obsessed. We are a frontier research lab. The science has to be right, the understanding deep, the product beautiful.
• Low Ego. The work speaks. The best idea wins, no matter who said it. Credit is shared. Nobody is above any task.
• Bold. We take the ambitious bet. We ship, we do not wait for conditions to be perfect.
• Kind. People over politics. We treat each other with genuine warmth. Agency without empathy creates chaos.

If this sounds like work you’d enjoy, we’d love to hear from you.

Base Annual Salary:

EU €130,000-€340,000 + Equity

Note: We may use AI-assisted tools to help organize applications. All hiring decisions are always made by our team.

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Source: Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis), table; dl-de/by-2-0; StarIn's calculation

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