Research Scientist, Foundation Model

About the Role

At Pika, we are pioneering the next generation of creative infrastructure built around real-time, multimodal generation and intelligent agentic platforms. We are seeking accomplished Research Scientists in Foundation Models with expertise in pre-training and mid-training large-scale multimodal foundation models to advance our mission of making agentic, real-time generative technology accessible and transformative for millions of creators. This is a staff and lead-level opportunity.

As a key member of our research team, you will design and implement core technologies, develop new methodologies for large-scale multimodal pre-training/mid-training (text, image, audio, and video), and drive innovative approaches for foundational model architecture. You will collaborate closely with engineering and product teams, shaping the future of real-time creative and agentic platforms at scale.

What You’ll Do

• Lead research and development on pre-training and mid-training of multimodal foundation models at scale.
• Design and prototype novel algorithms and architectures for high-fidelity, real-time multimodal synthesis and interaction across modalities.
• Focus on scalable data pipeline curation and model training strategies for broad, diverse, and sensory-rich datasets.
• Advance state-of-the-art techniques in diffusion, autoregressive, and other generative models for large-scale pre-training and fine-tuning.
• Identify, create, and leverage large, high-quality cross-modal datasets.
• Bring research advancements into production-ready systems in collaboration with engineering and product teams.
• Publish work in top-tier conferences and journals, and clearly communicate research both internally and externally.
• Stay at the forefront of foundational model and real-time multimodal AI research.

What We’re Looking For

* 5+ years of research experience in large-scale pre-training/mid-training of multimodal found...