LLM Research Scientist Adversarial Robustness
Overview
Mercor connects elite creative and technical talent with leading AI research labs. Headquartered in San Francisco our investors include Benchmark General Catalyst Peter Thiel Adam D'Angelo Larry Summers and Jack Dorsey. This contract position offers $100–$120/hour remote work. The role involves training image classifiers and generative image models from scratch fine-tuning open-weight language models optimizing models for limited data compute and model-size budgets enhancing model robustness against adversarial inputs and conversations compressing models to meet size and latency constraints diagnosing and resolving training issues to improve model performance.
What You'll Do6
- 1Train image classifiers and generative image models from scratch
- 2Fine-tune open-weight language models
- 3Optimize models for limited data compute and model-size budgets
- 4Enhance model robustness against adversarial inputs and conversations
- 5Compress models to meet size and latency constraints without losing accuracy
- 6Diagnose and resolve training issues to improve model performance
Requirements6
- 13+ years of machine learning research experience PhD research counts
- 2Strong experience with PyTorch JAX TensorFlow or similar ML frameworks
- 3Degree from a top-100 university experience at a FAANG or comparable AI company or equivalent research track record through publications or impactful open-source contributions
- 4Preferred experience with Adversarial Robustness and Efficient Computer Vision
- 5Knowledge in Generative Image Modeling and LLM Post-Training & Behavioral Robustness
- 6Experience in Multilingual Pre-training and additional areas like scaling laws and curriculum learning
Salary Insight
Salary not disclosed in listing
Location
Required Skills
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