Member of Engineering (Multimodality - Research Lead) - poolside

ABOUT POOLSIDE In this decade, the world will create Artificial General Intelligence... Poolside exists to be this company: to build a world where AI will be the engine behind economically valuable work and scientific progress. ABOUT OUR TEAM We were founded in the US and have our home there, but our team is distributed across Europe and North America. We get our fix of in-person collaboration (and croissants) in Paris each month for 3 days, always Monday-Wednesday... Our team is a multidisciplinary blend of research, engineering, and business experts. ABOUT THE ROLE You'll build a new team from the ground up, owning multimodality at Poolside: teaching our frontier coding model to see... The near-term focus is image input — the capability most useful to SWE and general agents — reading a design and speccing it out, writing and verifying the code that makes that design real, understanding the plots and diagrams in a paper. YOUR MISSION To bring multimodality to Poolside's models, starting with image input and building toward native multimodal understanding. RESPONSIBILITIES - Own Poolside's multimodality direction and capability adoption - Ship our first image-input capabilities - Chart and drive the path from adapter-based to native multimodality - Collaborate on custom evaluations and datasets for multimodal SWE capabilities - Run experiments end to end: hypothesis, implementation, training at scale, analysis - Partner with evals, architecture, data, and post-training teams to land multimodality in Poolside models SKILLS & EXPERIENCE - Experience in end-to-end training of production-grade VLMs - Strong LLM training fundamentals: transformers and distributed training at scale - Strong Python programming skills - Pragmatic and high-ownership: you reach for the simplest thing that works and thrive in greenfield ambiguity Nice to have: - Leadership and 0-1 experience, especially with substantial breadth, ownership, and hands-on contributions - Distinguished research background on VLMs or multimodal models - Understanding of the challenges of native multimodality - Experience building agentic computer use systems PROCESS - Intro call with one of our Co-Heads of Applied Research - Technical Interviews with Founding Engineers and Members of Engineering - Team fit call with the People team - Final interview with our Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Eiso BENEFITS - Fully remote work & flexible hours - 37 days/year of vacation & holidays - Health insurance allowance for you & dependents - 16 weeks of flexible, full-pay parental leave - Well-being, always-be-learning & home office allowances - Company-provided equipment - Frequent team get togethers - Diverse & inclusive people-first culture