Machine Learning Engineer – Model Distillation for Real-Time 2D Image Generative A

Lit8 develops generative AI systems for real-time 2D image generation and enhancement. In this role, you will focus on distilling, optimizing, and deploying high-performance image generative AI models, with an emphasis on speed, quality, controllability, and production-ready performance.

You will work closely with research, engineering, and product teams to make advanced image generation models faster, lighter, and suitable for real-world applications.

Minimum Qualifications

• At least 2 years of hands-on experience distilling image generation models, preferably image-to-image models.
• Strong experience with 2D image generative AI, including diffusion models, transformer-based image models, GANs, or other generative architectures.
• Practical experience with model distillation techniques such as teacher-student training, progressive distillation, consistency distillation, adversarial distillation, feature-level distillation, score distillation, or latent-space distillation.
• Experience working with image-to-image generation tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, super-resolution, denoising, image editing, style transfer, enhancement, or controllable generation.
• Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, evaluating, and optimizing image generation models.
• Experience improving inference latency, memory efficiency, throughput, and model quality.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Hands-on experience with modern ML frameworks, especially PyTorch.
• Solid understanding of model compression, mixed precision, quantization-aware optimization, pruning, or related efficiency techniques.
• Strong problem-solving, analytical, and communication skills.
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, research-driven, multidisciplinary technical environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience deploying optimized generative AI models into production applications, device-specific pipelines, or consumer-facing products.
• Familiarity with inference and deployment frameworks such as ONNX, TensorRT, OpenVINO, Core ML, DirectML, ROCm, Vulkan, or similar technologies.
• Experience benchmarking generative AI systems, including latency, throughput, memory usage, image quality, visual consistency, and stability.
• Experience with multimodal or foundation models for image generation, editing, enhancement, or controllable visual generation.
• Knowledge of GPU performance optimization, custom kernels, operator fusion, graph optimization, or hardware-aware model tuning.
• Contributions to open-source ML, computer vision, image generation, or model optimization projects are a plus.
• Relevant publications or research experience in generative AI, computer vision, model compression, or efficient inference are a plus.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and apply model distillation techniques to accelerate 2D image generative AI models.
• Work on image-to-image and related generative AI workflows, including editing, enhancement, denoising, inpainting, and super-resolution.
• Improve model efficiency while preserving image quality, controllability, visual consistency, and robustness.
• Train, fine-tune, and evaluate distilled models across different image generation tasks.
• Prototype and benchmark distillation strategies across different architectures and deployment targets.
• Optimize inference performance through distillation, compression, quantization, mixed precision, pruning, graph optimization, and memory-aware tuning.
• Build evaluation workflows to measure model quality, latency, memory usage, throughput, and reliability.
• Collaborate with research, engineering, and product teams to integrate optimized models into production applications.
• Stay current with advances in image generative AI, model distillation, efficient diffusion models, and real-time inference.

What We Offer

• The opportunity to work on advanced real-time 2D image generative AI systems.
• A fast-moving, research-driven environment with real product impact.
• The chance to make state-of-the-art image generation models faster, lighter, and production-ready.
• A culture that values technical excellence, ownership, creativity, and performance engineering.
• Attractive salary.

If you are passionate about image generative AI, model distillation, and building efficient production-grade