Featherless
via Ashby
AI Researcher — Distillation
This is the employer's own posting, not a copy on a job board.
What we know
Is it still open?
Confirmed still open
Last checked 1d ago — checked against the employer's own applicant tracking system, which is the company answering directly.
We re-read the employer's own applicant tracking system and the posting was still there. That is the company answering directly.
How old is it?
Posted 235d ago
The date the source published, not the day we noticed it (2026-01-23). Last seen at its source 2h ago.
Is it remote?
Remote (world)
That is the location the employer filed this posting under. Quoted as written — we do not re-word the source's own location.
Who may apply?
Available worldwide
The description states no restriction of its own. This is the source's own tag.
Skills named in the ad
Recognised terms only, from a fixed vocabulary — this is what CV matching compares against.
Carried by 1 source
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ashby employer's own board first seen 39d ago · last seen 2h ago
The listing
About the Role
We’re looking for an AI Researcher focused on model distillation to help us push the frontier of efficient, high-performance models. You’ll work on turning large, expensive models into smaller, faster, and more deployable systems—while maintaining or improving quality.
This role is ideal for someone who enjoys publishing research, working close to real systems, and seeing their ideas move from papers → code → production.
What You’ll Work On
Design and evaluate model distillation techniques (teacher–student training, self-distillation, layer-wise distillation, representation matching, etc.)
Research tradeoffs between model size, latency, memory, and accuracy
Develop novel distillation approaches for:
Large language models
Long-context or specialized architectures
Inference-constrained environments
Run large-scale experiments and ablations; analyze results rigorously
Collaborate with engineers to productionize research outcomes
Write and submit research papers to top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, COLM, etc.)
Contribute to internal research notes, technical blogs, and open-source projects when appropriate
What We’re Looking For
Required
Strong background in machine learning research
Hands-on experience with model distillation or closely related topics (compression, pruning, quantization, representation learning)
Publication experience (conference or journal papers, workshop papers, or arXiv preprints)
Solid understanding of deep learning fundamentals (optimization, training dynamics, generalization)
Fluency in PyTorch (or equivalent) and research-grade experimentation
Ability to clearly communicate research ideas, results, and limitations
Nice to Have
Experience distilling large language models
Work on efficiency-focused research (latency, memory, throughput)
Experience with long-context models or non-Transformer architectures
Open-source contributions in ML or research tooling
Prior startup or applied research experience
Why Join Us
Real ownership over research direction at a Series A stage
Strong support for publishing and open research
Tight feedback loop between research and real-world deployment
Access to meaningful compute and production-scale problems
Small, highly technical team with deep ML and systems expertise
Example Backgrounds
ML researchers from academia transitioning to industry
Research engineers with published work in model efficiency
PhD / Post-doc graduates or industry researchers who still want to publish