When people get a model running on their own machine, the next question often is, "Great, now what can I actually do with it?". This is where you come in.
Description
Local, on-device AI has clear advantages: privacy, offline availability, predictable cost, and data control for both home and business users. Your job will be to turn those advantages into concrete features: tool-using assistants, agentic RAG, document understanding, data analysis and manipulation, code assistants of various kinds, and anything else that makes local AI genuinely useful.
The work spans applied research, rapid prototyping, systematic evaluation, and production engineering delivered to a large and enthusiastic user base worldwide.
Responsibilities
Push the boundaries of what’s possible with local AI by designing and implementing new features
Identify and scope high-impact local AI use cases (RAG, document understanding, data analysis, code intelligence) and design end-to-end solutions
Prototype algorithms quickly, run systematic evaluations, and promote successful approaches into LM Studio’s production codebase
Survey recent papers and open-source work; adapt, implement, and benchmark promising ideas on consumer hardware
Collaborate with app, systems, and API focused team members to ship reliable features to a rapidly growing user base and iterate based on real-world feedback
Build automated test and benchmarking harnesses to track accuracy, latency, and memory across model versions and tasks
Minimum Qualifications
3+ years writing software every day (TypeScript or Python preferred; C++ a plus) - internships included
Demonstrated experience shipping LLM-powered features
Track record of running systematic experiments and using results to make algorithm choices
Ability to profile and debug performance issues at the model, runtime, or systems level
Strong written and verbal communication
Preferred Qualifications
Excellent ability to present your work to both technical and non-technical audiences
Experience publishing technical blog posts, conference papers, or open-source projects in NLP or IR
Background in information retrieval, compiler tooling, or systems performance engineering
History of maintaining SDKs, CLIs, or public APIs
Pay and Benefits
Equity
Medical, Dental, Vision insurance
401K
Company-provided MacBook Pro M3 or high-performance Windows/Linux laptop
Access to a range of hardware (GPUs, servers, devices)
Office in the Brooklyn Navy Yard with water views and free gym access
Annual Salary Range:
$165,000 – $350,000 USD
About Element Labs
Element Labs is an AI software company based out of New York, USA. We build LM Studio, a desktop application and developer platform for building on-device AI applications. Our mission is to make local AI accessible, useful, and ubiquitous. We are looking for teammates who want to take a huge swing at this mission with us.