Research Scientist

Why we exist: Oumi is on a mission to make frontier AI truly open for all. We are founded on the belief that AI will have a transformative impact on humanity, and that developing it collectively, in the open, is the best path forward to ensure that it is done efficiently and safely.

What we do: Oumi provides an all-in-one platform to build state-of-the-art AI models, end to end, from data preparation to production deployment, empowering innovators to build cutting-edge models at any scale. Oumi also develops open foundation models in collaboration with academic collaborators and the open community.

Our Approach: Oumi is fundamentally an open-source first company, with open-collaboration across the community as a core principle. Our work is:

• Open Source First: All our platform and core technology is open source

• Research-driven: We conduct and publish original research in AI, collaborating with our community of academic research labs and collaborators

• Community-powered: We believe in the power of open-collaboration and welcome contributions from researchers and developers worldwide

The Research Scientist will be an integral part of Oumi's research team, focusing on advancing the state-of-the-art in large language models (LLMs), vision language models (VLMs), and related technologies. This role involves conducting cutting-edge research, contributing to open-source projects, and collaborating with other researchers and engineers. Researchers at Oumi will work on various aspects of LLM/VLM development including training, evaluation, data curation, and benchmark development.

What you’ll do:

• Model Development: Conduct research on training and evaluating new Large language models (LLMs), Vision Language Models (VLMs), and other AI models. This includes exploring new architectures, training techniques, and optimization methods.

• Data Curation: Develop methodologies for curating high-quality datasets for training and evaluating LLMs. This may involve data synthesis and other novel techniques.

• Benchmark Development: Develop evaluation benchmarks to measure the performance of LLMs across various tasks and domains.

• Research and Experimentation: Design and conduct experiments to validate research hypotheses and improve model performance.

• Open Source Contribution: Contribute to the Oumi open-source platform, models and projects, and other relevant tools and libraries.

• Collaboration: Collaborate with other researchers, engineers, and the broader community to advance the field of open-source AI.

• Publication: Publish research findings in leading conferences and journals.

• Platform Evaluation: Evaluate existing models and identify areas of improvement.

• Flexibility: Work with various models, including text and multimodal models, and both open and closed models.

• Problem Solving: Focus on the research that matters by skipping the plumbing and moving straight to research, building on the work of others and contributing back.

What you’ll bring:

• Education: A Ph.D. or MSc. in computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or a related field is preferred. Candidates with a strong publication record, or equivalent industry experience will be considered.

• Research Experience: Demonstrated experience in conducting original research in machine learning, with a strong publication record in top-tier conferences or journals.

• ML Expertise: Deep understanding of machine learning and deep learning concepts, with specific knowledge of large language models (LLMs) and/or vision language models (VLMs).

• Programming Skills: Strong programming skills in Python and experience using deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch).

• Open Source: Familiarity with open-source projects and a passion for contributing to the open-source community.

• Initiative: A self-starter who can work independently and take ownership of initiatives.

• Values: Share Oumi's values: Beneficial for all, Customer-obsessed, Radical Ownership, Exceptional Teammates, Science-grounded.

• Competitive salary: $100,000 - $220,000

• Equity in a high-growth startup

• Comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance

• 21 days PTO

• Regular team offsites and events