Research Scientist, Video & Multimodal at Innodata

About this role

Innodata (Nasdaq: INOD) is a global data engineering company. We believe that data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are inextricably linked. Our mission is to enable the responsible advancement of artificial intelligence by providing the data, evaluation frameworks, and human expertise required to build AI systems that can be trusted at scale. We provide a range of transferable solutions, platforms, and services for Generative AI / AI builders and adopters. In every relationship, we honor our 36+ year legacy delivering the highest quality data and outstanding outcomes for our customers.

Scope of the Role

Video is where multimodal models are weakest and hardest to grade. Temporal reasoning, long-form understanding, grounding events in time, and holding audio, video, and text together do not fall out of image benchmarks — and the evaluations for them are still immature. Closing that gap is gated as much by how we design data and evaluation as by architecture. Innodata builds that data and those evaluations for the customers and frontier labs advancing video and multimodal models, and we are hiring a Research Scientist to own the science behind it.

You will partner directly with the customers and frontier labs building video understanding, video-language, and video-generation models, as interested in the data behind them as in the models themselves. Video spans two model families judged in completely different ways: models that understand video — answering questions, localizing events, grounding language in time — where the question is whether the answer is correct; and models that generate it, where fidelity, temporal coherence, and physical plausibility matter and no automatic metric is settled. You own the evaluation science for both, and knowing when model-based scoring can stand in for a human versus when it can't. Your conclusions shape what our partners measure and collect next.

What You’ll Own

You will define how Innodata designs, structures, and evaluates video data for video and multimodal models, and you will validate those choices experimentally. Concretely, you will:

You’ll Thrive in This Role If You Have

Roughly 5+ years of hands-on industry experience in video understanding or multimodal ML. We weight practical experience over formal credentials; a PhD with a compelling, current research agenda can offset the lower end.

A Bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or a related technical or quantitative field is required; an advanced degree (MS or PhD) in a relevant field is preferred.

Trained and evaluated video or multimodal models yourself, with strong PyTorch fundamentals.

Fluency in the formats and tooling video work runs on: ffmpeg and decord pipelines, temporal and COCO-style annotation, WebDataset, Parquet and Arrow, and HuggingFace datasets.

Experience fine-tuning large video or vision-language models with the modern toolchain (HuggingFace transformers, PEFT, efficient inference), and with long-form video, streaming, temporal segmentation, or synthetic video generation.

A way of thinking in datasets and benchmarks: you have built evaluation sets, calibrated difficulty, and argued about what makes video data good for a given objective.

A track record the field recognizes: first-author publications or strong open-source contributions at venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, or ICLR.

The ability to work directly with the research scientists at the customers and frontier labs we partner with, and to explain data and modeling decisions clearly to both expert and non-expert audiences, backed by a rigorous, reproducible approach to experiments and documentation.

Bonus: interest or hands-on experience in responsible-AI evaluation and red-teaming — safety and robustness testing for video and multimodal systems.

The expected salary range for this position is $160,000 - $185,000 p/year, based on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Please be aware of recruitment scams involving individuals or organizations falsely claiming to represent employers. Innodata will never ask for payment, banking details, or sensitive personal information during the application process. To learn more on how to recognize job scams, please visit the Federal Trade Commission’s guide at https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/job-scams.

If you believe you’ve been targeted by a recruitment scam, please report it to Innodata at verifyjoboffer@innodata.com and consider reporting it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

Research Scientist, Video & Multimodal