Member of Technical Staff, Applied Research

San Francisco, United States
Full-time
Visa Sponsorship

About the role

About the Role

We are looking for an AI Research Engineer to join our document understanding team.

This role is ideal for someone who sits between applied research and strong engineering. You will work on vision-language models, document processing, data curation, synthetic data generation, benchmarking, training, fine-tuning, and post-training. The goal is simple: make our document AI systems more accurate, faster, and more cost-effective in production.

You should be excited by frontier AI work, but equally motivated by practical product impact. This is not a pure research role where ideas stay in papers. You will be expected to prototype quickly, evaluate rigorously, and help turn promising approaches into production systems used by customers.

What You’ll Do

  • Develop and train vision-language models for document processing and document understanding.
  • Build data pipelines for data curation, synthetic data generation, labeling, and benchmark creation.
  • Evaluate base models and perform post-training or fine-tuning to hit specific performance targets.
  • Iterate on the agent layer on top of base models to improve quality and cost-effectiveness.
  • Design and maintain benchmarks to measure extraction quality, layout understanding, OCR performance, reasoning accuracy, and end-to-end system reliability.
  • Work with messy real-world documents, including PDFs, scanned documents, tables, charts, forms, and multi-page enterprise documents.
  • Collaborate with customers (less than 15% of the time) to translate product needs into benchmarks and model capabilities.
  • Stay close to the latest research in vision-language models, document AI, post-training, synthetic data, and agentic systems.
  • Use modern AI coding workflows and tools to move quickly.

About LlamaIndex

LlamaIndex empowers developers to build agents that extract insights and take action on complex enterprise documents. It combines industry-leading document parsing and extraction with a trusted framework for building intelligent agents that reason over documents, adapt to business logic, and scale to production. LlamaIndex is loved by developers and trusted by enterprises. Its open source framework is downloaded more than 4M+ every month and has processed more than 200 million documents on LlamaCloud.

Required skills

Python
Pydantic
vLLM
TensorRT
ONNX
Docker
Kubernetes

Other roles at LlamaIndex

Interested?

Let me introduce you to the founders.

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Job details

Salary

$180,000 - $250,000

Equity

0.1% - 0.3%

Location

San Francisco, United States

Experience

3+ years

Company

NameLlamaIndex
Industryai, enterprise, devtools, b2b, data
Team Size40

Funding

Total raised

$27.5M

Last stage

Series A

Investors

Norwest Venture Partners
Greylock
Databricks Ventures
KKPMG Ventures
AAmazon Web Services

Founders

Simon Suo

Simon Suo

Co-Founder & CTO

LinkedIn
Jerry Liu

Jerry Liu

Co-Founder & CEO

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.