---
title: 'Research Engineer -- Vision and Vision-Language Models at Zyphra'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-vision-and-vision-language-models-zyphra-san-francisco-tcb7cvz1g2qx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-18'
---

# Research Engineer -- Vision and Vision-Language Models at Zyphra

- **Company:** Zyphra
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-18
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zyphra/fc254772-f78d-41f1-a406-cbc1bfc69cc8

## Job description

The Role:

As a Research Engineer - Vision & Vision-Language Models, you will be a core contributor on Zyphra’s Vision Team, building the next generation of models for image understanding, computer use, and other agentic visual tasks. You will work across the full model development stack, from sourcing and generating data to pretraining, post-training, reinforcement learning, and evaluation. The Vision Team owns its models end-to-end, and you will have the opportunity to contribute wherever you can have the greatest impact. We care strongly about rate of learning, research taste, and ability to execute. Previous experience training vision-language models is valuable, but not required.

You’ll Work Across:

- End-to-end pretraining and post-training of vision-language models
- Large-scale vision and multimodal training runs
- Vision and multimodal dataset sourcing, generation, curation, processing, and evaluation
- Reinforcement learning and other post-training methodologies for vision-language models
- Computer use, visual agents, and other multi-turn agentic vision tasks
- Architecture, data, and training methodology ablations and improvements
- Performance optimization of our training and data processing stacks

What We're Looking For / Requirements:

- Strong research taste and intuition, with the ability to take ambiguous problems from conception to experimentation and execution
- Strong implementation and prototyping ability; you can turn ideas into experiments quickly
- A high rate of learning and an ability to rapidly become effective in unfamiliar technical areas
- Strong general machine learning intuition and an interest in understanding the full model development stack
- The ability to work well with others in a high-paced research setting
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, and the ability to work effectively across both research and engineering implementation at scale

Qualifications / Additional Skills:

- Experience working with vision, vision-language, video, or other multimodal models or datasets is highly valuable
- Experience training vision-language models is a plus, but not required
- Experience with large-scale model pretraining, post-training, reinforcement learning, or related methodologies
- Experience sourcing, generating, or curating vision datasets, including synthetic data generation
- Familiarity with image processing tools, libraries, or pipelines
- Experience with computer use agents, visual agents, GUI understanding, or other multi-turn multimodal tasks is a plus
- Experience with frontend development, web frameworks, UI/UX implementation, or mobile development is valuable, particularly for computer use and interface-understanding tasks
- Experience training models on large-scale, multi-node GPU clusters
- Strong grasp of experimental methodology for running rigorous ablations and hypothesis testing
- Understanding of large-scale, highly parallel data processing pipelines
- Proficiency with PyTorch and Python
- Strong ability to dive into large pre-existing codebases and rapidly get up to speed
- Published machine learning research in well-respected venues is a plus
- Postgraduate study in a scientific or technical field such as Computer Science, EE/EECS, Mathematics, Physics, or Machine Learning is a plus, but we care more about demonstrated ability and trajectory than credentials

Why Work at Zyphra:

- Our research methodology is grounded in methodical, step-by-step approaches to ambitious goals. Both deep research and engineering excellence are equally valued
- We strongly value new and crazy ideas and are very willing to bet big on new ideas
- You will have the opportunity to work across the entire model development lifecycle rather than being constrained to a narrow part of the stack
- We move as quickly as we can; we aim to minimize the bar to impact as much as possible
- We value rate of learning and growth, not just what someone has already done
- We all enjoy what we do and love discussing AI

Benefits and Perks:

- Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and FSA plans
- Competitive compensation and 401(k) plan
- Relocation and immigration support on a case-by-case basis
- In-office snacks and meals provided
- Unlimited PTO and company holidays
- In-person team in San Francisco with a collaborative, high-energy environment

## About Zyphra

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zyphra is a full-stack AI company building open foundation models and a sovereign cloud platform to deliver advanced AI to developers, enterprises, and hyperscalers.
- **Entity Type**: Private, Series A
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2020 (some sources cite 2021)
- **Founders**: Krithik Puthalath (CEO), Beren Millidge (Chief Scientist), Danny Martinelli (Head of Product), Tomás Figliolia (Chief Architect)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Foundation Models / Cloud AI Infrastructure
- **Target customers**: Developers, enterprises, and "frontier AI hyperscalers" (B2B)
- **Mission or purpose**: "Open Superintelligence" – to enable sovereign, transparent, and customizable AI that runs on any hardware without vendor lock-in.

## Products & Services
- **[Zyphra Research](https://www.zyphra.com/)**: Open-source foundation models trained on heterogeneous compute, focusing on novel architectures for long-term memory, continual learning, and silicon performance. Released as research prototypes.
- **[Zyphra Cloud](https://www.zyphra.com/)**: Full-stack AI platform built on AMD, designed for long-horizon agents. Provides managed infrastructure for deploying, customizing, and running Zyphra's or third-party models with full data sovereignty.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$11M** (Series A)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: AMD, Intel Capital, Future Ventures, Bison Ventures, Transpose Platform, and others
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew **151.9% YoY** to 53 employees
  - Operates in 5 countries (US, UK, Canada, India, Saudi Arabia) with offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and London
  - Active job postings: 14 (up 16.7% quarterly)
  - LinkedIn followers grew 236.3% year-over-year

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack open-source approach**: Combines novel model architectures (probabilistic computing, heterogeneous compute) with a cloud platform optimized for long-horizon AI agents.
- **Hardware agnosticism**: Promises "run intelligence across any hardware and any provider, without lock-in," with early focus on AMD silicon.
- **Commitment to openness**: Models are transparent, allowing customers to audit reasoning and adapt to specific domains.
- **Sovereignty focus**: Enterprises own their models, data, and deployments – appealing to regulated industries.

## Strategic Focus
- **Priority on architecture innovation** (continual learning, long-term memory, silicon performance) over scaling existing methods.
- **Building a full-stack platform** that tightly couples research breakthroughs with a production-grade cloud service.
- **Scaling the team** aggressively – hiring across research engineering, platform, developer relations, and AI engineering.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture of open research**: Employees contribute to novel model architectures that are publicly released, offering a rare blend of academic freedom and product impact.
- **Heavy engineering focus**: 57% of the team is in technical roles, with a flat structure (62% specialist-level roles).
- **Locations**: San Francisco (HQ) and London, with potential for remote-friendly roles (not explicitly stated).
- **Notable perks**: Not detailed publicly, but typical for a well-funded Series A startup (equity, benefits, etc.).
- **Growth trajectory**: 150%+ headcount growth signals rapid scaling and career advancement opportunities.

## Sources
1. [zyphra.com](https://www.zyphra.com/)
2. [zyphra.com about](https://www.zyphra.com/about)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/zyphra](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zyphra)
4. [linkedin.com/company/zyphra](https://www.linkedin.com/company/zyphra)
5. [cbinsights.com/company/zyphra](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/zyphra)

## Other roles at Zyphra

- [Machine Learning Systems Administrator / DevOps Engineer: Training Clusters & Inference Cloud](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-systems-administrator-devops-engineer-training-clusters-54x9wakr7cjb) — San Francisco, CA
- [GTM Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-engineer-zyphra-san-francisco-036cvpkp3amk) — San Francisco, CA
- [Principal Solutions Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-solutions-architect-zyphra-san-francisco-tvmr7yr66sye) — San Francisco, CA
- [Developer Relations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/developer-relations-lead-zyphra-san-francisco-8aak96cd9gcr) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer - Model Architectures](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-model-architectures-zyphra-san-francisco-q2xft42gbdne) — San Francisco, CA
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- [Research Engineer - Audio & Speech Models](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-audio-speech-models-zyphra-san-francisco-vpqsx2qaz8pm) — San Francisco, CA
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- [Platform Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-engineer-zyphra-san-francisco-7nkavn90wn8m) — San Francisco, CA