Slm & Vlm Engineer — Post-Training, Tool Calling & Agents

Job Summary We are looking for a highly capable engineer/researcher to lead the R&D of Small Language Models (SLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for edge / low-latency and cost-efficient production scenarios. You will own the continuous pretraining, supervised instruction tuning (SFT), and compression/distillation pipelines, and work closely with platform teams to deliver reliable, measurable improvements in inference efficiency, tool-use success rate, and overall model quality. Key Responsibilities 1) SLM/VLM Training: Continuous Pretraining &Instruction Tuning (SFT) Conduct continuous pretraining and SFT for SLMs and VLMs to improve task performance and domain adaptation. Build reproducible training workflows in PyTorch, including data processing, training, evaluation, and model versioning. 2) Compression, Distillation & Edge/Low-Latency Inference Optimization Design and implement efficient compression strategies for SLM/VLM, including knowledge distillation, pruning, and quantization-oriented training or post-training optimization. Optimize model serving and inference for low-latency / edge scenarios by improving throughput and cost-per-token via techniques such as quantization, caching/KV optimizations, batching strategies, and decoding-time optimizations. 3) Tool Calling System: Catalog, Routing, Validation, Fallback & Observability Architect and implement a production-grade tool calling(function/tool calling) framework: Tool cataloging and metadata/schema design Tool selection/routing and argument construction Parameter validation, result verification, and safe fallback/retry strategies Call-chain tracing, monitoring, and observability to improve success rate and ROI 4) RL & Reward Modeling for Alignment and Tool-Use Reliability Apply post-training methods such as PPO / DPO / GRPO-like optimization and reward modeling to align the model toward objectives including: semantic understanding tool-use success rate content generation quality and consistency …