Product Research Lead (Generative AI)

Location: Freiburg, Germany; hybrid attendance required at least 2 days per week or one full week every other week

Salary: $172,000–$220,000 base annually, plus equity, depending on profile

Company

Black Forest Labs develops foundational generative AI technologies including Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, and FLUX models for image and video creation.

What you will do

• Lead Product Research between model research teams and the market.
• Own the product-facing evaluation taxonomy, strategy, and evaluation runs.
• Turn evaluations, leaderboards, customer feedback, and usage data into ranked model improvement priorities.
• Set priorities for Applied Researchers conducting fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for core models and customer-specific variants.
• Define the data required to measure and improve model quality.
• Co-lead model releases, owning quality go/no-go decisions and capability claims.

Requirements

• Product or research management experience working directly on generative models.
• Technical depth in evaluation design, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning.
• Experience defining model improvement goals and driving research teams to act on them.
• Experience turning model weaknesses into ranked priorities or owning evaluation for a model release.
• Strong judgment in ambiguous, fast-changing research environments and end-to-end prioritization ownership.
• Ability to work from Freiburg with regular in-person attendance.

Nice to have

• Hands-on evaluation or machine learning engineering experience.
• Experience with diffusion or video models.

Culture & Benefits

• Distributed team with real offices in Freiburg and San Francisco.
• Reasonable travel costs covered for required Freiburg attendance.
• Research culture focused on scientific rigor, open science, and deep technical understanding.
• Values include high standards, low ego, bold execution, and kindness.
• Compensation includes base salary and equity.

Hiring process

• The interview process will clarify how the regular Freiburg in-person schedule will work for the role.