Founding ML Research Engineer

About the Role

Join an early-stage industrial AI team building wearable AI copilots for field technicians. As a founding engineering team member, you will own core multimodal systems that provide real-time assistance in complex work environments.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship agentic vision-language model pipelines for smart glasses and industrial workflows.

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

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

• Create real-time voice and video interfaces, including conversational and proactive assistance modes.

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

What We're Looking For

• Typically 2 to 6 years of experience shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems, with Python and PyTorch.

• Experience owning product outcomes and delivering AI systems to end users, including multi-step agents with real tool use.

• Strong applied expertise in model orchestration, visual reasoning, fine-tuning, evaluation, and data workflows.

• Experience with tools and frameworks such as vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, Hugging Face Transformers, and Docker.

• Background in edge inference, on-premise deployment, wearable AI, augmented reality, autonomous driving vision, or industrial AI is valuable.

• Strong CS, machine learning, or engineering fundamentals, plus startup, founding-team, or similarly fast-paced product-building experience.

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California.