Research Scientist / Engineer — Foundation Model (Agent)
Luma AI
Redwood City, CA · Posted July 24, 2026
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Where Redwood City, CA ranks
Where Redwood City, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #2Best cities for director and executive jobs in the West Coast32% · of 71
- #3Cities with the most hybrid jobs28% · of 100
- #3Cities with the most hybrid jobs in the West Coast28% · of 66
- #8Best all-round cities for remote workers in the West Coast68 / 100 · of 39
- #9Cities that post pay most often44% · of 100
- #10Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast17% · of 54
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing does not state pay. Across 76 open research scientist listings that state pay, the middle half runs $166,500 to $296,500 and the median is $218,500.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
How AI is used in this kind of work
AI use among industrial engineering technologists and technicians is little observed so far. Measured exposure for industrial engineering technologists and technicians: 0% (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.
Skills this job asks for
Say which you have and which you want to build. We use it to match you to jobs like this one.
About the job
You'll build and train large-scale multimodal agentic models — systems that reason, plan, code, and call tools to do complex, multi-step work over pixels. This is core research shaping how users interact with what Luma's models can do.
It's a multi-stack research role across modeling, data, systems, and evaluation, on novel problems with no existing playbook, treating science and engineering as equally important. It fits someone grounded in foundation models and agentic systems who's trained models at real scale. If you want to work in only one layer of the stack, this deliberately spans several.
What You'll Own
- Architect large-scale multimodal agentic models that use reasoning, planning, coding, and tool calling for complex, multi-step work.
- Design, build, and run robust data pipelines to construct, enrich, and filter massive pixel datasets, and formulate new tasks.
- Train large-scale multimodal models on massive datasets and GPU clusters.
- Define and build novel evaluation frameworks to measure multimodal agents.
First 90 Days
One way the first 90 could unfold.
- Days 1–30 — Immerse & Diagnose: Learn the current models, agentic approaches, and where evaluation and data are weakest.
- Days 30–60 — Ship & Validate: Improve an agentic capability (reasoning, tool use, or coding) and prove it with a new eval.
- Days 60–90 — Scale & Systemize: Scale the approach across datasets and clusters and harden the evaluation framework.
What You Bring
- Strong foundation in machine learning, foundation models, and agentic systems.
- Deep understanding of agentic systems and LLM/VLM reasoning, coding models, and tool calling.
- Hands-on PyTorch and large-scale training (distributed, mixed precision, large datasets).
Nice to Have
- Experience with state-of-the-art foundation models in reasoning, coding, or tool calling, or state-of-the-art multimodal agents.
About Luma: Luma's mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. We believe multimodality is critical for intelligence — the next step beyond language models comes from vision. Luma is an equal opportunity employer.