Member of Technical Staff - Pretraining
Hybrid (Freiburg, Germany or San Francisco, USA)€130k - €340kfull-timePosted 6mo ago
About the role
Staff/Senior IC role focused on leading pretraining for multimodal foundation models (image, video, audio) with impact from research to production in a distributed team.
Responsibilities
- Lead large-scale pretraining experiments for multimodal 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
Qualifications
- 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
Skills
Required:pretrainingarchitectural designdistributed trainingPythonPyTorchvisual generative models
Last updated Jul 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Black Forest Labs
The frontier AI research lab for visual intelligence.
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