Applied Researcher: On-Device Multimodal Reasoning

The Video Computer Vision (VCV) organization is an applied research and engineering team developing real-time, on-device Computer Vision and Machine Perception technologies across Apple products. Within VCV, our team builds next-generation multimodal AI systems that combine on-device multimodal encoders, large language models, and foundation models to create intelligent systems capable of understanding, reasoning, and acting across language, vision, audio, and tools.

Our work is deeply integrated into the Apple ecosystem, partnering across hardware, software, and ML teams to deliver real-time, scalable, and privacy-preserving experiences reaching millions of users.

Description

We are seeking an Applied Researcher with deep expertise in multimodal reasoning at small model scale — making vision-language models in the smaller regime (under ~10B parameters, down to sub-1B) think, plan, and act reliably under strict compute, memory, and latency constraints.

In this role you will own the reasoning side of the on-device multimodal stack: designing compact VLMs that reason over images, video, and 3D scene content; compressing and distilling the reasoning process itself; and engineering the decoding and inference path that makes multi-step reasoning affordable on an Apple device. This role offers the unique opportunity to define what on-device intelligence looks like for hundreds of millions of users.