Staff Gen AI Research Scientist
$220k - $292k • Costa Mesa, California, United States; Seattle, Washington, United States; Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Posted 12d ago
Job Location
Costa Mesa, California, United States; Seattle, Washington, United States; Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
Anduril Industries is a defense technology company focused on transforming military capabilities with advanced technology. The Air Dominance & Strike team develops aerial and multi-domain robotic systems, including unmanned fighter jets and cruise missiles, and the Lattice for Mission Autonomy software platform. We are seeking an AI Research Scientist to be a founding ML expert, designing, fine-tuning, and deploying generative AI, LLMs, and agentic systems for our air-dominance platforms. This is a highly applied research role focused on making state-of-the-art LLM models smaller, faster, and smarter, optimizing them for both offboard systems and power-constrained edge hardware. As an early member, you will have significant autonomy to set technical direction, design data collection strategies, and influence multi-agent autonomy deployment.
Responsibilities
- Develop, pre-train, and fine-tune in-house LLMs and multimodal foundation models.
- Apply SOTA post-training alignment techniques (SFT, RLHF, DPO) to maximize capability while minimizing cost and footprint.
- Architect and optimize models to run directly on tactical edge compute and power-constrained hardware.
- Optimize model latency, memory usage, and execution speed through quantization, distillation, and pruning.
- Design and implement robust agentic architectures, multi-agent coordination frameworks, and planning loops for complex missions.
- Collaborate with computer vision, perception, and motion planning teams to build systems reasoning over diverse modalities.
- Define and execute data collection strategies across physical assets, test sites, and simulations.
- Build early-stage prototypes, iterate on feedback, and scale them into production-grade features.
Requirements
- Experience as a founding ML expert.
- Experience designing, fine-tuning, and deploying generative AI, LLMs, and agentic systems.
- Experience optimizing LLM models for size, speed, and efficiency.
- Experience optimizing models to run on power- and compute-constrained edge hardware.
- Experience with quantization, distillation, and pruning techniques.
- Experience designing and implementing agentic architectures and multi-agent coordination frameworks.
- Experience reasoning over diverse modalities (camera feeds, radar, telemetry, text).
- Experience defining and executing data collection strategies.
- Experience building and scaling early-stage prototypes into production-grade features.
- Experience working with AI Infrastructure engineers to build scalable evaluation frameworks.
- Experience in high-stakes environments.