Research Engineer, Large Language Models (Montain View, CA)

Our Customer is a Silicon Valley- based company that is engaged in researching emerging technologies.

We are seeking a contract LLM Research Engineer to support our Customer's business needs. This role is on-site in Mountain View, CA.

Responsibilities:

• Design, train, and fine-tune large language models (e.g., GPT, LLaMA, PaLM) for a variety of applications.
• Conduct research on cutting-edge techniques in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to improve model performance.
• Explore advancements in transformer architectures, multi-modal models, and emergent AI behaviors.
• Collect, clean, and preprocess large-scale text datasets from diverse sources.
• Develop and implement data augmentation techniques to improve training data quality and ensure alignment with ethical AI standards.
• Optimize model architecture for accuracy, efficiency, and scalability.
• Implement methods to reduce latency, memory footprint, and inference time for real-time applications.
• Collaborate with MLOps teams to deploy LLMs into production using Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure.
• Build robust evaluation pipelines to measure model performance (accuracy, perplexity, BLEU, F1 score).
• Continuously test for bias, fairness, and robustness across diverse datasets.
• Conduct A/B testing to validate improvements in real-world scenarios.
• Stay current with advancements in generative AI, transformers, and NLP research.
• Contribute to research papers, patents, and open-source projects.
• Present findings and insights at conferences and internal knowledge-sharing sessions.

Skills and Qualifications:

• Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or related field.
• 7–10 years of professional experience in data science, machine learning, or AI, with hands-on work in LLMs or NLP.
• Strong programming skills with proficiency in Python.
• Expertise with deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or JAX.
• Hands-on experience with transformer-based models (e.g., GPT, BERT, RoBERTa, LLaMA).
• Strong knowledge of NLP and sequence-to-sequence models.
• Familiarity with Hugging Face libraries and OpenAI APIs.
• Experience with MLOps tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Solid understanding of distributed computing and GPU acceleration using CUDA.
• Knowledge of reinforcement learning and RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback).

We offer a competitive salary range for this position. Most candidates who join our team are hired at the median of this range, ensuring fair and equitable compensation based on experience and qualifications.

Contractor benefits are available through our 3rd Party Employer of Record (Available upon completion of waiting period for eligible engagements)

Benefits include: Medical, Dental, Vision, 401k.

An Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.