Lucid

interactive video models

Hiring — 1 openYC-W25Early

What Lucid does

We are building universe simulations powered by interactive video models. We train video models that simulate hyper-realistic environments with immersive control, replacing hard-coded game or physics engines with dynamic neural networks. We built the fastest action-conditioned diffusion video model (running at 20+fps on a 4090 gaming gpu) to simulate minecraft. It is 5x faster than other minecraft World Models and was trained with 100x less resources. Our unique insight was relying on aggressive compression in our tokenizer (128x versus the traditional 8x), and because attention scales quadratically with # of tokens our model can run blindingly faster. Now we’re training a hyper realistic world model!

1 open role

Member of Technical Staff
San Francisco, CA, USFull-timeAny (new grads ok)$150K - $250K0.50% - 1.50% equityVisa: US citizen/visa only
What the role involves

Lucid is a small team building real-time interactive video models that spark joy, and are seeking a talented engineer to build the infrastructure that makes this possible. If you are passionate about our mission, we would love to hear from you! Role Description You are an experienced software engineer who builds the systems that power large-scale ML training. You understand how to move and process petabytes of data efficiently, manage distributed GPU workloads, and create infrastructure that researchers can rely on. You know how to optimize for the specific constraints of training large models while maintaining system reliability. What you'll do Build systems to handle petabytes of training data efficiently Design and manage distributed training infrastructure across GPU clusters Evaluate and implement orchestration systems (we currently use SLURM) Work directly with ML researchers to identify and solve infrastructure bottlenecks Build the foundational systems that let our team iterate quickly on large-scale experiments Requirements Strong distributed systems experience with focus on performance optimization Deep understanding of ML training infrastructure and distributed training patterns Experience with Python and PyTorch in production environments Comfortable working with both cloud and bare metal infrastructure Self-starter who can evaluate technical trade-offs and make architectural decisions Excellent communication and collaboration skills Location San Francisco, CA What we offer at Lucid Interesting and challenging work Base salary $180,000-250,000 plus equity A lot of learning and growth opportunities Health, dental, and vision insurance (US) Regular team events and offsites

PythonDistributed SystemsDeep Learning

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