Founding ML Researcher

About the Role

Join an early-stage industrial AI startup as a founding member of its engineering team. You will build and ship the multimodal AI systems behind smart-glasses assistants, helping field workers handle real-world inspections and operational workflows.

What You'll Do

• Build production agentic vision-language pipelines that use multi-step visual reasoning and tools for industrial workflows.

• Develop evaluation frameworks, capture failure modes, and create data and fine-tuning loops that improve model quality.

• Adapt model orchestration and edge inference to changing connectivity, latency, and hardware constraints.

• Create real-time voice and video interfaces, including conversational and proactive alert experiences.

• Fine-tune open-weight multimodal models for enterprise deployments, using approaches such as supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and quantization.

What We're Looking For

• Zero to three years of experience building and shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems, with Python and PyTorch.

• Experience owning model orchestration and product outcomes, including multi-step agent loops with real tool use and evaluation frameworks.

• Applied computer vision and fine-tuning experience, such as supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, detection or segmentation, and model evaluation.

• Experience deploying AI products beyond research prototypes; edge inference, on-premise deployment, or constrained hardware experience is valuable.

• Familiarity with tools such as vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, Hugging Face Transformers, and quantization methods.

• Background in a startup or high-intensity engineering environment, and strong CS, machine learning, or engineering fundamentals, or equivalent production experience.

• Interest or experience in wearables, augmented reality, autonomous systems, or industrial AI.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $180,000 to $230,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California.