AI Research Scientist

As a member of our AI research team, you will drive innovation in model compression and efficient deployment for advanced multimodal AI systems, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). Your work will focus on reducing model footprint and computational cost while preserving accuracy, enabling high-performance AI to run efficiently across resource-constrained edge devices. You will apply and advance compression techniques such as quantization, knowledge distillation, and pruning to streamline complex multimodal architectures that integrate text, images, and audio.

Responsibilities

• Apply low-bit quantization to reduce model size and inference latency for generative AI models (LLMs, VLMs, multimodal) while maintaining accuracy and output quality.
• Leverage knowledge distillation to transfer capabilities from larger teacher models to smaller student models, enabling efficient multimodal reasoning across text, image, and audio inputs.
• Implement pruning techniques to remove redundant parameters and attention heads, reducing computational overhead without sacrificing task performance.
• Analyze trade-offs between model efficiency (size, latency, memory) and accuracy across quantization, distillation, and pruning methods; propose improvements based on empirical findings.
• Research and apply mixed-precision quantization and other advanced compression strategies (e.g., adaptive pruning schedules, distillation with intermediate feature matching) to optimize the accuracy–performance balance.
• Stay current with the latest research in model compression, including emerging techniques for multimodal and generative architectures.
• Document methodologies, experiments, and results clearly to support reproducibility, internal collaboration, and stakeholder communication.
• Author technical papers and publish findings in top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL, AAAI) to advance the field of model compression for multimodal AI.

Requirements

• A degree in Computer Science or related field. Ideally PhD in NLP, Machine Learning, or a related field, complemented by a solid track record in AI R&D (with good publications in A* conferences).
• Experience with PyTorch deep learning frameworks or equivalent frameworks.
• Hands-on experience with model quantization including both Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) and Post-Training Quantization (PTQ).
• Research and hands-on experience with knowledge distillation for compressing large models into smaller, efficient ones.
• Research and hands-on experience with model pruning for compressing large models into smaller, efficient ones.
• Solid understanding of neural network architectures and training processes – Including transformers (e.g., LLMs, VLMs), backpropagation, optimization, and fine-tuning techniques.
• Familiarity with C++ is a plus (especially for implementing low-level quantization kernels or inference optimizations).

Location
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates