What are the responsibilities and job description for the Member of Technical Staff (ML Systems) position at VLM Run?
Company Description
VLM Run is building the Unified Gateway for Visual AI — an end-to-end platform for developers to fine-tune, specialize, and deploy Vision Language Models (VLMs) for processing images, videos, and documents. Our horizontal platform lets enterprises unlock the potential of "dark visual data" with industry-specific VLMs tailored for verticals like healthcare, finance and retail.
Role Description
We’re seeking exceptional engineers who excel in one or more of the following areas:
- ML/CV Development: Advance our core VLM capabilities, including vision-language understanding, model architecture innovation, OCR and function-calling enhancements, fine-tuning acceleration, and robustness improvements.
- ML Infrastructure: Build and optimize our full VLM stack, focusing on model compilation, acceleration, distillation, and cost-efficient serving and scaling.
- High Agency & Innovation: Bring creativity, problem-solving skills, and a strong work ethic to help us define what’s next for VLMs.
Required Expertise (BS & 4 YoE, MS & 2 YoE)
- Training: Vision Transformers (ViTs), PyTorch, HuggingFace (trl, transformers, peft), advanced quantization/distillation techniques, latest open-source VLM architectures (Llama, Qwen, Phi etc).
- Serving: CUDA optimizations, torch.compile, OpenAI triton kernel authoring, serving infra (vLLM, ollama, native HF), speculative/guided decoding etc.
- SW / DevOps: Python, GCP/AWS, Github SW dev-cycle, docker, conda, ray, Test-driven development (TDD)
- Bonus (send us a one-liner email with a link)GitHub Stars or Papers Published: Have a GitHub repo with 1K stars? Published impactful ML/CV research or software? We’d love to see it.
- SaaS Experience: Proven track record in building SaaS or AI applications, from landing pages to auth, billing, logging, telemetry, and infrastructure.
- No Advanced Degree Required: If you’re a hacker who stands out with past ML systems or research, show us what you’ve built!
Other Details
- Pay Equity Range: $150K-$220K / yr, 0.5-2% equity
- Competitive compensation and benefits: We pay market rate for seed-stage startups equity options, offer great healthcare dental insurance and 401K.
- In-person: At least 3 days a week in Santa Clara, CA (we’re right by 101, next to AMD’s offices).
Salary : $150,000 - $220,000