Member of Technical Staff - VLM

• You've pretrained or significantly advanced a VLM (not just SFT'd or LoRA'd one) that was deployed in a production system or released publicly
• Strong publication record or unambiguous production track record showing you push the frontier on multimodal architectures
• Deep understanding of how vision and language representations interact: tokenization, alignment, grounding, cross-modal attention, and the failure modes of each
• Experience with distributed training at multi-node scale
• Comfortable at the research/production boundary — you care whether the work ships and generalizes, not just whether it reads well
• Strong PyTorch fluency; you write research code that others can build on. You work fluently with coding agents to move faster, and have the depth to verify their output and own the result.
• Experience running multi-agent workflows: you know which tasks to hand off and which to keep yourself, and you use the speed-up to raise the quality bar, not lower it.
• Experience with diffusion or flow-based generative models is a strong plus — especially if you've thought about how autoregressive and diffusion paradigms can compose

Vision-language models are becoming foundational to how people interact with generative AI — but most VLM research happens in isolation from the generation stack. At Black Forest Labs, we're integrating VLMs directly into FLUX in ways that make our models more powerful, more controllable, and more aligned with what creators actually want.

This role is about pioneering that integration. You won't be applying off-the-shelf VLMs — you'll develop novel approaches, innovate on architectures, and answer questions that haven't been solved yet: how vision and language representations inform each other, how multimodal understanding improves generation quality, and how to make these capabilities deployable at scale without compromising what makes FLUX exceptional.

This is a Staff / Senior IC role. We're looking for someone who has pretrained or significantly advanced a VLM, not just fine-tuned one.

• Obsessed. We are a frontier research lab. The science has to be right, the understanding deep, the product beautiful.
• Low Ego. The work speaks. The best idea wins, no matter who said it. Credit is shared. Nobody is above any task.
• Bold. We take the ambitious bet. We ship, we do not wait for conditions to be perfect.
• Kind. People over politics. We treat each other with genuine warmth. Agency without empathy creates chaos.

If this sounds like work you’d enjoy, we’d love to hear from you.

Note: We may use AI-assisted tools to help organize applications. All hiring decisions are always made by our team.

About Black Forest Labs

We’re the team building the foundational layer for visual intelligence: multimodal models trained jointly on images, video, audio, and action to see, generate, and understand the world.

Our founding team pioneered latent diffusion and Stable Diffusion, the breakthroughs that made generative AI accessible to millions. With FLUX, we're pushing into generative media at scale, machines that act in the physical world, and emerging applications in computer use.

Our FLUX models top public benchmarks and run in production in some of the world's biggest platforms. We're a small, fast growing research lab competing with the largest companies in the world. From our labs in Freiburg to San Francisco, we're building what comes next.

How we work together

We’re a distributed team with real offices that people actually use. This role is based in Freiburg, and you’ll join us in the office at least 2 days a week, or one full week every other week.