AI Research Engineer (Model Compression & Quantization)

Innovate with Tether

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But that’s just the beginning:

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Why Join Us?

Our team is a global talent powerhouse, working remotely from every corner of the world. If you’re passionate about making a mark in the fintech space, this is your opportunity to collaborate with some of the brightest minds, pushing boundaries and setting new standards. We’ve grown fast, stayed lean, and secured our place as a leader in the industry.

If you have excellent English communication skills and are ready to contribute to the most innovative platform on the planet, Tether is the place for you.

Are you ready to be part of the future?

About the job

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.

Responsibilities

Break down the key responsibilities in bullet points. It’s helpful to make them actionable and measurable. This could also be grouped into categories for more complex roles.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.