---
title: 'Research Scientist / Engineer - Controllability, Personalization & Productization at Luma'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-engineer-controllability-personalization-productization-luma-c562h2w31bng'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Research Scientist / Engineer - Controllability, Personalization & Productization at Luma

- **Company:** Luma
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Compensation:** $200k–$450k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2025-07-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/lumalabs-ai/cb7f6fe2-4ed1-4cf8-9964-ea9b4f47e85d

## Job description

## About the Role

This is a foundational opportunity to refine, personalize, and build the final capabilities and control interface of Luma’s foundation models and drive real-world value. You’ll sit at the intersection of research, product, and partnerships, helping close the gap between generalist capability and production needs. Your mission is to make our video foundation models more expressive, controllable, and personalized – solving the “last mile” challenges demanded by top-tier creative workflows.

## What You’ll Do

You will work as a fullstack researcher across modeling, data, systems, and evaluation to translate foundational capabilities into the personalized and high-fidelity tools required by top-tier creative production.

- Controllability and Features: You will use SFT, RL, distillation, and adapter-based methods to give Luma’s models precise control and creative capabilities for high-fidelity, partner-grade workflows.
- Personalization: You will use context management, PEFT, and preference learning to embed domain expertise and long-horizon memory into our models. You’ll ground our data engine in real-world workflows, translating usage into training and data insights that shape future models.
- End-User Quality: You will define and drive end-user quality – setting success metrics, building user-aligned evaluations, and iterating on the model/data/evals loop to meet  strict fidelity and reliability targets in specific verticals.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: You will partner with Product and Design to turn creative intent and user feedback into clear specs and shippable model behaviors, delivering intuitive control and dependable capabilities for users and partners.

## Who You Are

- Strong foundation in machine learning with deep experience in visual generative models (diffusion/transformers or related architectures). Ideal candidates also have a deep understanding of at least one: fine-tuning, personalization, domain adaptation, data curation, targeted distillation, interpretability, or human-feedback-driven refinement.
- You are a product-obsessed researcher/engineer. You treat end users and partners as collaborators and enjoy solving specific “last mile” problems – not just optimizing public metrics.
- Hands-on experience with PyTorch and large model training.

Bonus Points

- Contributions to state-of-the-art models in image/video generation.
- Experience collaborating with creative partners (VFX, animation, film, design tools).
- Track record building workflows/tools that materially improve iteration speed and evaluation rigor.
- Familiarity with large-scale training infrastructure and distributed systems (Ray, Slurm, Kubernetes).

## About Luma

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Luma builds multimodal AI models that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world, shipping them in products like Dream Machine for creators and teams.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: Redwood City, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Not publicly listed on official sources

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Generative AI / Creative AI
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises, agencies, developers) and B2C (creators, filmmakers)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world.

## Products & Services
- **Luma Dream Machine**: Consumer-facing product for turning ideas into compelling visuals (video, image, audio, text) using generative AI.
- **Ray 3.2 API**: Production-grade video generation API with full creative control—multi-keyframe (up to 16), V2V up to 20 seconds, reframe, 1080p output, native HDR, and 16-bit EXR export.
- **Uni-1.1 API**: Multimodal reasoning model API for image generation (text-to-image, reference-guided) and natural-language image editing, with up to nine reference inputs per request.
- **Luma Agents**: Agentic creative workflows that plan, generate, iterate, and refine across every stage of creative work—available in the Luma App and trusted by teams at Publicis Groupe, Serviceplan, Mazda, Dentsu, and Humain.
- **Open Physical AI Lab**: An open science effort to solve generalization in physical AI, built in the open for the benefit of all humanity.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metrics**: Total Funding: $1.3B+ (official site) / $1.057B (LinkedIn); Annual Revenue: $5M (LinkedIn estimate); Users worldwide: 30M+; Team Members: 250+
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: HUMAIN (led Series C), Andreessen Horowitz (led Series B), Amplify Partners (led Series A), Matrix (led Seed Round). Partners include Envato, Comfy, Runware, Flora, Krea, Magnific, Fal, LovArt.
- **Growth Signals**: 250+ team members, 30M+ users, $1.3B+ total funding, 45% yearly LinkedIn follower growth, recent product launches (Ray3.2, Uni-1.1, Luma Skills, Wonder Project partnership), $900M Series C raised November 2025.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack AI**: Luma builds its own foundation models end-to-end, rather than wrapping third-party models—giving it unique control over quality, latency, and cost.
- **Multimodal reasoning**: Uni-1 understands intention and responds to direction, not just prompts—offering brand intelligence at the model level.
- **Cinematic-grade output**: Ray 3.2 delivers 1080p, native HDR, 16-bit EXR export—production-ready for professional film and advertising pipelines.
- **Open science commitment**: The Open Physical AI Lab publishes research openly, attracting top-tier research talent and fostering community trust.
- **Speed & cost**: Claims less than half the price and latency of comparable models.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling enterprise adoption**: Custom deployment for creative teams at scale across advertising, film, and gaming production pipelines.
- **Agentic workflows**: Building Luma Agents as a force multiplier for creative teams—automating repetitive tasks while maintaining brand consistency.
- **Physical AI research**: Advancing the Open Physical AI Lab to solve generalization in physical AI, bridging digital generation with real-world operation.
- **API ecosystem growth**: Expanding the developer platform with two tiers (Build and Scale) and SDKs for Python and JavaScript/TypeScript.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & mission**: "We believe real-world physics is the path to general intelligence. We unite research, product, and go-to-market into one engine." Described as a "lean, high-achieving team" building the future of creative intelligence.
- **Compensation & benefits**: Competitive compensation, 100% covered medical/dental/vision for employee and family, $1,500/year learning stipend, catered meals, team events, home office setup.
- **Work mode**: On-site roles in Redwood City, CA with additional offices in New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; and international locations (Munich, Paris, London, Berlin).
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on shipping frontier research directly into products—"frontier research ships straight into the hands of working creatives." Hiring across research, systems engineering, infrastructure, design, and product.
- **Hiring process**: Transparent and fast—aims to complete within 2-3 weeks. Application review within a week, then recruiter screen, hiring manager interview, and team/leadership interviews.
- **Employee ratings**: 4.1/5.0 on LinkedIn (9 reviews)—Work-Life: 3.6, Compensation: 4.4, Culture: 4.1, Career: 4.2.
- **Open roles**: 46+ open positions including Forward Deployed Engineer, Research Scientist, Software Engineer, Robotics Engineer, Simulation Researcher, Site Reliability Engineer, Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise Account Executive, and more.

## Sources
1. [lumalabs.ai - Careers](https://lumalabs.ai/careers)
2. [lumalabs.ai - Official Site](https://lumalabs.ai/)
3. [lumalabs.ai - LLM Info](https://lumalabs.ai/llm-info)
4. [LinkedIn - Luma](https://linkedin.com/company/lumalabsai)

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