Founding ML Researcher

About the Role

Join an early-stage industrial AI startup building wearable AI assistants for field technicians in critical infrastructure. You will help develop and ship the multimodal AI systems that power real-time assistance on smart glasses.

What You'll Do

• Build production agentic vision-language pipelines that use visual reasoning and tools to support industrial workflows.

• Develop evaluation frameworks, capture model failures, and use field data to improve model quality over successive releases.

• 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, including supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and quantization.

What We're Looking For

• 0 to 3 years of experience shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems, with Python and PyTorch.

• Experience owning model and orchestration layers end to end, building multi-step tool-using agents, and delivering product outcomes for end users.

• Applied computer vision expertise, including visual reasoning and, where relevant, detection or segmentation; experience with fine-tuning and evaluation rather than only pretraining from scratch.

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

• Startup or high-ownership engineering experience, with a strong foundation in computer science, machine learning, or engineering, or equivalent production experience.

• Interest or experience in wearables, AR, industrial AI, autonomous systems, or edge and on-premise deployment is valuable.

• Must be authorized to work without new employer visa sponsorship.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary is $180,000 to $230,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, United States.