Machine Learning Engineer - Distillation
External
Featherlessai · RemoteFull-timeRemote4mo ago
Deep LearningLLMsMachine LearningPyTorch
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About the role
We're looking for a Machine Learning Engineer focused on model distillation to help us build smaller, faster, and more efficient models without sacrificing quality. You'll work at the intersection of research and production-taking cutting-edge techniques and turning them into systems that scale. This is a hands-on role with real ownership: you'll design distillation pipelines, run large-scale experiments, and ship models used in production.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement knowledge distillation pipelines (teacher-student, self-distillation, multi-teacher, etc.)
- Distill large foundation models into smaller, faster, and cheaper models for inference
- Run and analyze large-scale training experiments to evaluate quality, latency, and cost tradeoffs
- Collaborate with research to translate new distillation ideas into production-ready code
- Optimize training and inference performance (memory, throughput, latency)
- Contribute to internal tooling, evaluation frameworks, and experiment tracking
- (Optional) Contribute back to open-source models, tooling, or research
Requirements
- Strong background in machine learning or deep learning
- Hands-on experience with model distillation (LLMs or other neural networks)
- Solid understanding of training dynamics, loss functions, and optimization
- Experience with PyTorch (or JAX) and modern ML tooling
- Comfort running experiments on multi-GPU or distributed setups
- Ability to reason about model quality vs. performance tradeoffs
- Pragmatic mindset: you care about shipping, not just papers
- Experience distilling LLMs or large sequence models
- Experience with inference optimization (quantization, pruning, kernels, etc.)
- Familiarity with evaluation for language models
- Open-source contributions or research publications
- Experience in early-stage or fast-moving startups
Benefits
Work on core model quality and cost efficiency -not side projectsHigh ownership and direct impact on product and roadmapSmall, senior team with strong research + engineering cultureCompetitive compensation + meaningful equityRemote-friendly, async-first environmentRemote work optionsEquity / stock options
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