Member of Technical Staff - VLM

Black Forest Labs seeks a Staff-level Member of Technical Staff to pioneer the integration of vision-language models into the FLUX stack, focusing on novel architectures and production-ready multimodal systems.

This position centers on advancing how generative AI interacts with visual content by embedding vision-language models directly into the FLUX generation pipeline. The role demands a senior individual contributor who will design innovative architectural approaches rather than simply applying existing solutions, ensuring models are more powerful, controllable, and aligned with creative workflows.

Responsibilities

• Architect and train cutting-edge multimodal vision-language models within the FLUX ecosystem, focusing on novel structural innovations.
• Develop specialized fine-tuning methodologies to adapt vision-language models for creative tasks such as image captioning, editing instructions, and prompt refinement.
• Investigate how vision-language and large language model capabilities can be integrated with diffusion and flow pipelines to enhance output quality and user control.
• Assess new multimodal research and implement the most promising findings to drive practical advancements in the generation stack.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience pretraining or significantly advancing a vision-language model that has been deployed in production or released publicly.
• A strong publication history or clear production track record demonstrating the ability to push the boundaries of multimodal architectures.
• Comprehensive knowledge of vision-language representation interactions, including tokenization, alignment, grounding, cross-modal attention mechanisms, and common failure modes.
• Proven experience conducting distributed training across multiple nodes.
• Ability to operate effectively at the intersection of research and production, with a focus on shipping work that generalizes well.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with diffusion or flow-based generative models, particularly understanding how autoregressive and diffusion paradigms can be combined.

What the company offers

• Annual base salary between €130,000 and €340,000, supplemented by equity.
• Reimbursement for reasonable travel expenses related to in-person meetings.

About the company

Black Forest Labs operates as a frontier research lab dedicated to research excellence, open science, and developing technology that expands human creativity. The team values deep scientific inquiry, beautiful product design, and a low-ego culture where the best ideas prevail regardless of origin. The company encourages bold, ambitious bets and prioritizes kindness and genuine warmth among team members, treating people above politics.

• Focus on research excellence, open science, and expanding human creativity.
• Distributed team structure with offices in Freiburg and SF, requiring hybrid in-person attendance.
• Commitment to deep science and beautiful product design.
• Low-ego environment where the best idea wins and credit is shared.
• Bold approach to ambitious projects, shipping without waiting for perfect conditions.
• Kindness and genuine warmth, prioritizing people over politics.