Research Engineer, Lead

The posting, as Vizcom wrote it

RESEARCH ENGINEER, LEAD

San Francisco, CA · In Person · Full-Time

Applying to this role will also allow us to consider you for other research opportunities at Vizcom. We believe the best roles are shaped around exceptional people, not just job descriptions.

ABOUT VIZCOM

Vizcom is where design teams at companies like Nike, GM, New Balance, and Hasbro bring ideas from sketch to product. Designers use Vizcom to sketch, render, explore color and materials, work in 3D, and prepare concepts for production.

The render itself was never the point. The point is the physical thing that comes after it. We call this pencil to product.

Vizcom is a Series B company with more than $52M raised from investors including Radical Ventures, Index Ventures, and Nat Friedman.

Five years of professional designers working this way has created something difficult to reproduce in a traditional research environment: millions of moments where a trained designer, in the middle of real work, decided what should survive into a product that ultimately has to become real.

Those decisions create a uniquely interesting research problem. A designer's preference among several candidates can reflect the generator's style, where they are in the design process, what they are trying to make, and the professional judgment they bring to the decision. Existing approaches don't cleanly separate those signals.

Understanding that judgment — and learning how to model it — is the challenge this role will help solve.

THE ROLE

As a Research Engineer, Post-Training, you'll work on models that help us understand and learn from the judgment that carries a design from pencil to product.

You'll work closely with the engineers building our post-training stack, contributing to experiments, model training, evaluations, and a growing body of research documenting the approaches we've tested, what we've learned, and where we've found meaningful signal.

This role sits directly between research and product. You'll have the opportunity to see the models you work on ship to working designers, while learning from the real-world signals generated by how those designers use Vizcom.

If your primary goal is research that ends with publication, this may not be the right environment. If you're excited by the idea of helping build models that influence what professional designers see in the product, it probably is.

We also believe the strongest results won't come from clever objectives alone. They'll come from excellent engineering: correct training code, rigorous evaluations, reliable pipelines, and experiments we can trust.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

• Execute well-scoped post-training research and engineering projects, from experiment design through evaluation and implementation.
• Train and evaluate reward and preference models using years of professional design decisions.
• Explore and apply methods including supervised fine-tuning, distillation, preference optimization, and reinforcement l

[…]
des San Francisco.

The actual offer and overall compensation package will be determined based on multiple factors, including relevant experience, skills, qualifications, and business considerations. The compensation and benefits described in this posting apply to U.S.-based W-2 employees and may vary based on applicable employment laws and requirements.

BENEFITS AT VIZCOM

• 100% employer-sponsored medical coverage for employees, plus 25% coverage toward dependents
• Dental and vision coverage, plus mental health benefits
• Meaningful equity ownership
• Flexible PTO
• 401(k) with employer match
• Generous annual Learning & Development allowance
• Paid parental leave
• Weekly catered lunch at our San Francisco headquarters
• Monthly gym membership stipend

HOW WE WORK

• We document what we learned, not just what we worked on.
• Negative results are valuable when they help us close off the wrong paths.
• Results should be reproducible before they earn additional compute.
• We share meaningful research through technical write-ups, demonstrations, and showcases where appropriate.
• Our interview process emphasizes real-world problem solving and practical technical work rather than LeetCode-style interviews.

LOCATION

This is an in-person role based in San Francisco, CA.

As part of Vizcom's SOC 2 Type II compliance program, employment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check, as permitted by applicable law.

JOIN US

At Vizcom, we move quickly, give people meaningful ownership, and offer the opportunity to shape both our product and our company as we grow. We believe deeply in the craft of industrial design and in building tools that help designers bring better ideas into the physical world.

We are not accepting outreach from recruiters on this role, and ask applicants to refrain from reaching out to our employees. A real human reviews all applications.

Join us in shaping a world designed by you.