River AI
Research Engineer / Research Scientist
$200K–$420K
Palo Alto, CA +1 · Full-time · Posted May 14, 2026
- Location
- Palo Alto, CA
Palo Alto, California, United States - Education
- BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, or equivalent practical industry experience.
- Visa sponsorship
- We sponsor visas.
About the job
Designs and trains foundation models for personal AI, with emphasis on continual learning, personalization, and efficient local inference.
What you'll do
- Design, train, and evaluate foundation models for reasoning, multimodal understanding, and personalization.
- Research continual learning and develop data-efficiency, alignment, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques.
- Scale experiments and novel architectures in partnership with the infrastructure team.
What they ask for
- BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, or equivalent practical industry experience.
- Deep understanding of modern deep learning architectures and advanced training methodologies.
- Hands-on experience with PyTorch or JAX and a track record of writing clean, scalable model-training code.
- Ability to take open-ended research problems from mathematical formulation to scaled implementations.
Nice to have
- Impactful publications at top-tier AI conferences or equivalent industry research breakthroughs.
- Expertise in continual learning, reinforcement learning, edge/on-device inference, or pre-training or aligning frontier-scale language or multimodal models.
Pay
$200,000 - $420,000 USD per year (base salary)
Tools
Transformers, diffusion models, PyTorch, JAX, RLHF, PEFT
AI focus
Research and develop personalized foundation models that continually learn from local user interaction, handle reasoning and multimodal tasks, and run efficiently on local hardware.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative