AI Research Engineer (Model Compression & Quantization)

At Tether, we’re not just building products, we’re pioneering a global financial revolution. Our cutting-edge solutions empower businesses—from exchanges and wallets to payment processors and ATMs—to seamlessly integrate reserve-backed tokens across blockchains. By harnessing the power of blockchain technology, Tether enables you to store, send, and receive digital tokens instantly, securely, and globally, all at a fraction of the cost. Transparency is the bedrock of everything we do, ensuring trust in every transaction.

As a member of our AI research team, you will drive innovation in model compression and efficient deployment for advanced multimodal AI systems, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). Your work will focus on reducing model footprint and computational cost while preserving accuracy, enabling high-performance AI to run efficiently across resource-constrained edge devices. You will apply and advance compression techniques such as quantization, knowledge distillation, and pruning to streamline complex multimodal architectures that integrate text, images, and audio.

We expect you to have deep expertise in model compression methods and a strong background in multimodal model architectures. You will adopt a hands-on, research-driven approach to develop, test, and implement novel compression strategies that balance model size, latency, throughput, and accuracy. Your responsibilities include building robust compression pipelines, establishing performance and fidelity metrics, and addressing bottlenecks in production inference. The ultimate goal is to deliver scalable, low-memory, low-latency AI systems on edge devices (i.e., smartphones) that maintain high fidelity and tangible real-world value.

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  Apply low-bit quantization to reduce model size and inference latency for generative AI models (LLMs, VLMs, multimodal) while maintaining accuracy and output quality.

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  Leverage knowledge distillation to transfer capabilities from larger teacher models to smaller student models, enabling efficient multimodal reasoning across text, image, and audio inputs.

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  Implement pruning techniques to remove redundant parameters and attention heads, reducing computational overhead without sacrificing task performance.

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  Analyze trade-offs between model efficiency (size, latency, memory) and accuracy across quantization, distillation, and pruning methods; propose improvements based on empirical findings.

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  Research and apply mixed-precision quantization and other advanced compression strategies (e.g., adaptive pruning schedules, distillation with intermediate feature matching) to optimize the accuracy–performance balance.

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  Stay current with the latest research in model compression, including emerging techniques for multimodal and generative architectures.

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  Document methodologies, experiments, and results clearly to support reproducibility, internal collaboration, and stakeholder communication.

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  Author technical papers and publish findings in top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL, AAAI) to advance the field of model compression for multimodal AI.

List the qualifications, certifications, and experience needed for the role. You can split this into mandatory and preferred sections if needed.

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  A degree in Computer Science  or related field. Ideally PhD in NLP, Machine Learning, or a related field, complemented by a solid track record in AI R&D (with good publications in A* conferences).

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  Experience with PyTorch deep learning frameworks or equivalent frameworks

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  Hands-on experience with model quantization including both Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) and Post-Training Quantization (PTQ).

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  Research and hands-on experience with knowledge distillation for compressing large models into smaller, efficient ones.

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  Research and hands-on experience with model pruning for compressing large models into smaller, efficient ones.

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  Solid understanding of neural network architectures and training processes – Including transformers (e.g., LLMs, VLMs), backpropagation, optimization, and fine-tuning techniques.

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  Familiarity with C++ is a plus (especially for implementing low-level quantization kernels or inference optimizations).