Job Specifications
At Goodnotes, we believe that every individual holds untapped potential waiting to be unleashed. By reimagining the way we interact with information, we're merging human creativity with the breakthrough capabilities of AI. Our renewed vision and mission drive us to create the best medium for human and AI collaboration, empowering users to explore new dimensions of productivity, creativity, and learning. Join us on this journey as we transform digital note-taking into an inspiring and innovative experience.
Our Values:
Dream big
—Be visionary, strategic, and open to innovation
Build great things
—Work in service of our users, always improving and pushing higher
Operate like an owner
—Propel company success and impact with an entrepreneurial mindset
Win like a sports team
—Be trusting and collaborative while empowering others
Learn and grow fast
—Never stop learning and iterate fast
Share our passion
—Share ideas and practice enthusiasm and joy
Be user obsessed
—Empathetic, inquisitive, practical
About the team:
After delivering a number of agentic and other generative AI experiences to help our users automate mundane tasks in their workflows, we are accelerating the research and development of cutting-edge features leveraging AI to create the best productivity and note-taking platform. You will be part of the applied research team, delivering state-of-the-art multi-modal LLMs to our product teams for features that impacts the lives of millions of users. They're a very international team, with your future coworkers based in countries across Europe and Asia. However, due to the asynchronous nature of working that Goodnotes has adopted, any time difference will not impact your work-life balance. During the natural overlap of hours within the team, you will collaborate with other researchers, as well as designers, software engineers and QAs to review any blockers.
About the role:
As the LLM Research Manager, you will lead a team of LLM and multimodal researchers building the AI systems that power Goodnotes' most advanced user experiences. You will combine strong technical depth with people leadership, research direction, and cross-functional execution.
This is the role for you if you're excited to:
Lead research direction for agentic and multimodal systems enabling freeform and spatial (visual + relational) content understanding
Guide the design and scaling of advanced RAG systems across handwritten notes, whiteboards, typed documents, and PDFs
Shape a new medium that combines multimodal LLMs with freeform note-taking to transform how people think, create, and engage with information
Mentor and grow a team of researchers through goal setting, research rigor, experimentation methodology, and career development
Partner with engineering to productionize LLM pipelines and ensure high-quality, reliable deployment of research outputs into user-facing features
Drive execution in a fast-paced, multidisciplinary environment, aligning research priorities with product goals and shipping impactful AI capabilities rapidly
The skills you will need to be successful in the above:
Experience & Leadership
8+ years of relevant industry experience, including 2+ years leading research teams in LLMs, multimodal models, or related areas
Strong track record driving LLM/VLM research from ideation to production, with a particular focus on post-training (SFT, RLHF/GRPO, DPO/IPO, preference modeling)
Technical Depth
Deep theoretical understanding of modern ML (representation learning, optimization, regularization, curriculum/data selection strategies)
Proven experience with non-text modalities such as handwriting/ink, sketches, diagrams, layouts/UI, or canvas/whiteboard content
Strong hands-on experience with Python and a major deep learning framework, with comfort reviewing/steering complex model code and experiments
Experience building or overseeing evaluation pipelines for LLMs/VLMs, including custom datasets, metrics, and human evaluation processes
Expertise in multimodal or structured architectures (vision encoders, layout-aware models, graph-based representations, hybrid tokenization)
Execution & Collaboration
Demonstrated ability to design principled experiments, diagnose failure modes, and guide systematic iteration across a research team
Strong engineering hygiene: reproducibility, experiment tracking (MLflow or similar), versioning, documentation, and reliable model handoff to engineering
Excellent communication skills—able to translate complex modeling trade-offs to product stakeholders and provide clear technical direction to researchers
Nice to have: research publications, open-source contributions, or industry impact in LLMs/VLMs; prior work on freeform or spatial content is a major plus
Even if you don't meet all the criteria listed above, we would still love to hear from you! Goodnotes places a lot of value on learning and development and will support your growth if needed.
The interview proces