Principal Research Engineer

The role

We are building the next generation creative studio, powered by the most capable video and image foundational models. We are creating the place where generative image and video experiences will be built.

We’re a small team of young & hungry researchers, and have raised over $30m from world class investors including Khosla Ventures & YCombinator. We released our first model two months ago, quickly becoming the fastest growing AI product on Discord since Midjourney with over 100,000 users in 6 weeks.

We’re looking for a Principal Research Engineer and the role is fully remote.

At Moonvalley, our product development process will be a bit non-standard and consist of small autonomous teams working to ship great features and experiences. Here is a good primer. You’ll work closely with your team (product designer, developers) daily, take ownership, make calls, and see things through without a lot of oversight.

What you'll do (responsibilities)

As a Principal Research Engineer, you'll be working alongside MLEs, you will ensure the development and deployment of cutting-edge AI models. Reporting directly to our Chief Scientist Officer, you will be responsible for:

• Architecting and developing high-performance MLOps systems that seamlessly integrate with our AI models, enhancing both development and deployment cycles
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams—spanning data scientists, AI researchers, and software engineers—to deeply understand requirements and align data, infrastructure and model training strategies with our ambitious goals
• Providing technical leadership in the selection and implementation of software technologies
• Diagnosing and resolving complex software challenges, optimizing the performance and reliability of our AI/ML systems
• Guiding project planning and estimation to ensure resources are efficiently allocated, facilitating on-time and impactful solution delivery
• Crafting and maintaining essential technical documentation to support system architecture, API usage, and operational guidelines
• Scaling high volume parallel AI models

What we're looking for (qualifications)

The ideal candidate for this role should possess:

• Masters or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics or a related field with experience in modern deep learning technology
• Minimum 5 years working with a leading world-class, high performance engineering team
• Expertise in machine learning tools, and implementing best practices
• Proven experience with scaling large-scale LLMs and/or other Deep Learning systems
• Strong technical proficiency in AI and ML, capable of guiding complex project designs and implementations
• (Nice to have): Experience with low-level optimizations; in particular, low-level GPU programming

What we offer (compensation & benefits)

• Competitive salary and equity
• Health coverage
• Unlimited paid vacation
• Fully-distributed culture that’s async first
• Hardware setup