Research Scientist, Post-Training — Video Generation

Highlights

• Own RL alignment for Pika's video generation models at multi-node scale.
• Build video reward models driving human preference and quality gains.
• Distill RL-tuned models into efficient few-step samplers for real-time creation.

What they offer

• Competitive salary and substantial equity in a high-growth startup
• Full health benefits + 401k matching
• Collaborative, mission-driven team environment with significant growth opportunities

Ideal candidate

A research-minded builder with deep post-training experience who loves aligning generative video to human taste and owning frontier models end-to-end in a fast-moving creative startup.

Requirements

• 2+ years hands-on research experience in post-training or generative modeling
• RL or preference-optimization experience on generative models with evidence of model improvement
• Strong grounding in diffusion or flow-matching models, PyTorch, and multi-node distributed training
• Experience developing reward models for visual generation, including VLM-as-judge or large-scale preference data collection
• Distillation expertise (distribution matching, consistency, adversarial approaches), ideally for video models
• Familiarity with video-specific failure modes: temporal drift, motion and physics realism