Research Engineer, Generative Video
Captions
New York, NY · $175k–$300k a year · Posted September 28, 2026
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Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $237,500 a year. Across 71 open research engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $237,500 to $439,000 and the median is $300,000. That is inside the middle half of those listings, 21% below the median.
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AI use among mechanical engineers is little observed so far. Measured exposure for mechanical engineers: 8% (little observed).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
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About the job
Mirage is an AI video company focused on making creation dramatically easier. Our team tackles some of the hardest creative and technical challenges in generative media.
We get to rethink how people collaborate with AI that can actually do creative work with them—defining entirely new interaction paradigms for AI-native video tools. We make that possible by building multimodal agents that turn creative direction into edits, rendering engines that composite multiple layers of video and graphics, and generative video models trained from the ground up that create new media when needed.
All of this comes together in Captions, our creative workspace for generating, editing, and designing video. The technology behind Captions is now available more broadly: Tesseract gives any AI agent native video-editing capabilities, while developers can integrate our models into their own products through APIs.
Explore our work Captions https://apps.apple.com/us/app/captions-ai-edits-your-video/id1541407007 — Our flagship creative workspace Tesseract https://x.com/trymirage/status/2102429594804429138 — Our professional video engine for AI agents Research https://mirage.app/research?utm_source=chatgpt.com — The foundation models we build in-house Updates https://x.com/trymirage — The latest from Mirage TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/24/mirage-raises-75m-to-continue-building-models-for-its-ai-video-editing-app-captions/, Forbes https://www.forbes.com/companies/captions/?list=ai50, Fast Company https://www.fastcompany.com/91270234/video-most-innovative-companies-fast-company-2025-youtube-roku-tubi-vimeo-captions-descript-cour-procreate-synthesia-beeble — Press
Our Investors
We’re very fortunate to have some the best investors and entrepreneurs backing us, including Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Uncommon Projects, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Lenny Rachitsky, Antoine Martin, Julie Zhuo, Ben Rubin, Jaren Glover, SVAngel, 20VC, Ludlow Ventures, Chapter One, and more.
Please note that most of our roles will require you to be in-person at our NYC HQ (located in Union Square)
About the Role Mirage is seeking an ML Engineer to build and scale the systems powering our video generation models. You’ll work on novel modeling approaches, training objectives, scaling strategies, and inference optimization and efficiency to bring cutting-edge models into production.
This role sits at the intersection of research and systems engineering, focusing on making advanced models faster, more efficient, and capable of ultra-low latency, real-time generation.
Responsibilities
- Train and optimize large-scale video and multimodal models
- Improve efficiency across training and inference (memory, latency, cost)
- Implement techniques such as distillation, quantization, and pruning to aggressively accelerate diffusion and autoregressive generation
- Build and maintain distributed training systems
- Optimize GPU utilization, parallelism, and throughput
- Develop tooling for experimentation, evaluation, and debugging
- Translate research models into robust, production-ready systems
- Monitor and improve model performance in real-world usage
What makes you a great fit
- BS/MS/PhD in CS, ML, or related field
- 2+ years of professional industry experience
- Strong experience in deep learning systems and infrastructure
- Expertise in PyTorch, CUDA, Triton, and distributed training (FSDP, etc.)
- Experience scaling and optimizing large models under low-latency inference constraints
- Strong debugging and performance profiling skills
- Ability to move quickly from prototype to production
BENEFITS:
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
- 401K with employer match
- Commuter Benefits
- Catered lunch multiple days per week
- Dinner stipend every night if you're working late and want a bite!
- Grubhub subscription
- Health & Wellness Perks
- Multiple team offsites per year with team events every month
- Generous PTO policy
Captions provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
Please note benefits apply to full time employees only.