Model Engineer, Multimodal Understanding

SpaceX Super Intelligence

Palo Alto, CA2h agovia LinkedIn

This job at a glance

Who can apply
New grads, no experience needed
Must know
System design
Nice to have
Data structures & algorithmsPythonC++Rust
Work
On-site in Palo Alto
Pay
Not stated by the employer.
Skill demand
Python11%System design10%C++6%Data structures & algorithms2%of 99 similar entry-level jobs posted in the US this week
Listed
Nov 6, 2026 · still open

Sign in free to see which of these skills your resume already shows.

About the Role

You will join the multimodal team to push toward superhuman multimodal intelligence. Advance understanding and generation across modalities—image, video, audio, and text—spanning the full stack: data curation/acquisition, tokenizer training, large-scale pre-training, post-training/alignment, infrastructure/scaling, evaluation, tooling/demos, and end-to-end product experiences. Collaborate cross-functionally with pre-training, post-training, reasoning, data, applied, and product teams to deliver frontier capabilities in multimodal reasoning, world modeling, tool use, agentic behaviors, and interactive human-AI collaboration. Contribute to building models that can see, hear, reason about, and interact with the world in real time at unprecedented levels.

Key Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and optimize large-scale distributed systems for multimodal pre-training, post-training, inference, data processing, and tokenization at web/petabyte scale
  • Develop high-throughput pipelines for data acquisition, preprocessing, filtering, generation, decoding, loading, crawling, visualization, and management (images, videos, audio + text)
  • Advance multimodal capabilities including spatial-temporal compression, cross-modal alignment, world modeling, reasoning, emergent abilities, audio/image/video understanding & generation, real-time video processing, and noisy data handling
  • Drive data quality and studies: curation (human/synthetic), filtering techniques, analysis, and scalable pipelines to support trillion-parameter models
  • Create evaluation frameworks, internal benchmarks, reward models, and metrics that capture real-world usage, failure modes, interactive dynamics, and human-AI synergy
  • Innovate on algorithms, modeling approaches, hardware/software/algorithm co-design, and scaling paradigms for state-of-the-art performance
  • Build research tooling, user-friendly interfaces, prototypes/demos, full-stack applications, and enable rapid iteration based on feedback
  • Work across the stack (pre-training → SFT/RL/post-training) to enable reasoning, tool calling, agentic behaviors, orchestration, and seamless real-time interactions

Requirements & Tech Stack

  • Experience writing production-quality code in Python, PyTorch, JAX, Rust, or C++

Preferred Skills and Experience

  • Expert-level proficiency in Python (core language), with strong experience in at least one of: JAX / PyTorch / XLA
  • Proven track record building or optimizing large-scale distributed ML systems (training/inference optimization, GPU utilization, multi-GPU/TPU setups, hardware co-design)
  • Deep experience designing and running data pipelines at scale: curation, filtering, generation, quality studies, especially for noisy/real-world multimodal data
  • Strong fundamentals in evaluation design, benchmarks, reward modeling, or RL techniques (particularly for interactive/agentic behaviors)
  • Proactive self-starter who thrives in high-intensity environments and is passionate about pushing multimodal AI frontiers
  • Willingness to own end-to-end initiatives and do whatever it takes to deliver breakthrough user experiences
  • Experience leading major improvements in model capabilities through better data, modeling, algorithms, or scaling
  • Familiarity with state-of-the-art in multimodal LLMs, scaling laws, tokenizers, compression techniques, reasoning, or agentic systems
  • Proficiency in Rust and/or C++ for performance-critical components
  • Hands-on work with large-scale orchestration tools such as Spark, Ray, or Kubernetes
  • Background building full-stack tooling: performant interfaces, real-time research demos/apps, or end-to-end product ownership
  • Passion for end-to-end user experience in interactive, real-time multimodal AI systems

Compensation and Benefits

  • $160,000 - $250,000 USD Base Salary
  • Equity
  • Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage
  • Access to a 401(k) retirement plan
  • Short & long-term disability insurance
  • Life insurance
  • Various other discounts and perks

SpaceX Entry-Level & New Grad Jobs · last 7 days

102 openings · 11 need no experience

See all 102 →

FirstHire never charges to apply, and real employers don't ask for money for tests, interviews or offer letters. How we list jobs · Report this job