Founding ML Research Engineer

About the Role

Join an early-stage industrial AI team building wearable AI tools for field technicians. You will own key parts of the multimodal AI stack, taking vision-language and agentic systems from development into real-world production.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship agentic vision-language model pipelines for smart glasses, including multi-step visual reasoning and tool use in industrial workflows.

• Develop evaluation frameworks, capture model failures, and build data and fine-tuning loops that improve quality with each release.

• Adapt model connectivity and edge inference for varied network conditions, latency requirements, and hardware constraints.

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

• Fine-tune and optimize multimodal models for enterprise deployments, including on-premise environments.

What We're Looking For

• Two to six years of experience shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems, with ownership of model and orchestration layers.

• Strong Python and PyTorch skills, plus experience with tools such as vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, Hugging Face Transformers, and Docker.

• Hands-on experience with visual reasoning, multi-step agent loops and tool use, evaluation design, data flywheels, and applied fine-tuning such as SFT or RLHF.

• Product engineering experience delivering AI features to end users, ideally in a startup or high-ownership engineering environment.

• Background or demonstrated interest in computer vision, wearables, industrial AI, AR, autonomous driving, or edge and on-premise inference.

• A bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, machine learning, or engineering, or equivalent relevant experience.

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location

On-site, five days per week in San Francisco, California, United States.