Founding ML Research Engineer

About the Role

Join an early-stage industrial AI team building wearable AI copilots for field workers. You will own core parts of the multimodal AI stack, from production vision-language systems to real-time experiences running on hardware in the field.

What You'll Do

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

• Develop evaluation harnesses, capture failure modes, and turn customer data into fine-tuning cycles that improve model quality.

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

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

• Fine-tune and optimize open-weight multimodal models for enterprise and on-premise deployments.

What We're Looking For

• Two to six years of experience shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems, using Python and PyTorch.

• End-to-end ownership of production AI products, including model orchestration, evaluation, and downstream product outcomes.

• Experience building multi-step agents with real tool use, rather than only retrieval wrappers or single-turn chatbots.

• Applied expertise in fine-tuning methods such as SFT and RLHF, evaluation design, and visual reasoning; pretraining from scratch is not the focus.

• Familiarity with technologies such as vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, Hugging Face Transformers, quantization, and edge inference.

• Startup, founding-engineer, or other high-ownership product-building experience, and a strong interest in computer vision, wearables, and industrial AI.

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

• Production wearable or AR AI, autonomous-driving vision, on-premise deployment, or constrained-hardware experience is valuable.

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location

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