Senior Researcher, Multi-Modality

About the role

Lightspeed Studios is a Tencent unit focused on next-generation game experiences, and its Lightspeed Tech Center is the R&D department behind games such as PUBG Mobile. It is looking for a Senior Researcher in multi-modality to help shape multimodal foundation models and agentic AI for gaming. The role works on multimodal understanding, post-training and agent research, turning real game scenarios into research problems and deploying solutions across many gaming use cases.

Key responsibilities

• Pioneer new research directions in multimodal understanding, post-training, reasoning, grounding and agent planning, grounded in real gaming scenarios.
• Abstract research problems from game business scenarios, solve them and deploy solutions for diverse in-game applications.
• Advance multimodal large models (VLMs/MLLMs) across images, video, text and audio.
• Lead post-training methods such as SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, reward modeling and preference alignment.
• Design and run experiments end-to-end, from data and benchmarking to training, evaluation and iteration.
• Work with engineers to turn research prototypes into production and deploy them at scale.
• Publish at top-tier conferences and contribute to the research community.

Required profile

• PhD in Computer Science, ML or a related field, or equivalent research experience.
• Consistent first-author publications at leading venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR or ACL.
• Ability to abstract research problems from real business (ideally gaming) scenarios and drive them to deployment.
• Passion for high-impact research with real-world applications.

Required skills

• Expertise in multimodal understanding and vision-language reasoning, or pre-/post-training of LLMs/VLMs, or reinforcement learning and LLM-based agents, or representation learning.
• Strong implementation skills in modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch and JAX.
• Proven ability to run complex experiments, analyse results and iterate quickly.