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Research Scientist – Multimodal Foundation Models

Mecka AI - Toronto, ON, Canada - In-office - posted 2026-10-15

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Mecka AI is building the data infrastructure layer for robotics and embodied AI. The company designs and operates global systems for data capture, data labeling, and hardware-enabled workflows used by leading AI labs and robotics companies to train and validate humanoid and embodied AI systems. You will advance the capabilities of large-scale vision-language and multimodal foundation models, working on challenging research problems spanning model training, post-training, reinforcement learning, and multimodal reasoning. This is a hands-on role for someone who enjoys experimenting with cutting-edge approaches, improving model performance, and translating research breakthroughs into real-world capabilities. Key responsibilities include: - Research, develop, and improve vision-language models and multimodal foundation-model architectures - Design and implement advanced training strategies, including supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and reinforcement learning - Investigate approaches to improve reasoning, generalization, reliability, and training efficiency - Develop strategies for data curation, filtering, and synthetic data generation - Design experiments, evaluation frameworks, and benchmarks to measure model performance and identify failure modes - Work with distributed training infrastructure and large-scale datasets - Explore emerging approaches in multimodal learning, model alignment, and foundation-model training You will work closely with frontier robotics teams to bridge real-world data, simulation, learning-based systems, and deployed hardware, with opportunities across the full model development lifecycle. REQUIREMENTS: Must Have: - Hands-on experience researching, training, fine-tuning, or post-training large-scale foundation models, particularly vision-language or multimodal models - Experience working with Qwen, Qwen-VL, or comparable open-weight multimodal foundation models - Strong understanding of deep learning architectures, optimization techniques, and modern model training methodologies - Practical experience with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, or reinforcement learning approaches such as DPO, GRPO, PPO, or RLHF - Strong proficiency in Python and PyTorch, JAX, or comparable deep learning frameworks - Experience designing, executing, and analyzing large-scale machine learning experiments - Familiarity with distributed training systems and GPU-based model development - Strong research instincts, analytical problem-solving skills, and ability to independently drive complex technical projects - Research publications, open-source contributions, or experience within leading AI research organizations Nice to Have: - Experience with large-scale model post-training and reinforcement learning for reasoning or alignment - Familiarity with multimodal data pipelines involving images, video, or other sensory inputs - Experience with reward modeling, synthetic data generation, or advanced model evaluation - Experience improving model capabilities through innovations in training strategies, data quality, or model architecture

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