Founding ML Research Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE

Join an early-stage industrial AI startup as a founding engineer building the multimodal AI core of wearable tools for field technicians. You will own production vision-language systems from model orchestration through deployment on real hardware.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Build and ship agentic vision-language pipelines that support industrial workflows such as inspections and standard operating procedures.
• Develop evaluation frameworks, capture failure cases, and use field data to improve model quality across 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 assistance modes.
• Fine-tune and optimize open-weight multimodal models for enterprise and on-premise deployment.

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 AI product outcomes, including agent loops with tool use, model orchestration, evaluation, and data improvement workflows.
• Applied experience with fine-tuning methods such as SFT or RLHF, plus deployment and inference optimization. Pretraining from scratch is not the focus.
• Familiarity with technologies such as vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, Hugging Face Transformers, quantization, and edge AI.
• Background in computer vision, wearable or AR systems, industrial AI, or related applied multimodal work. Experience with on-premise models or constrained hardware is useful.
• Strong CS, machine learning, or engineering fundamentals, and a record of independently driving product decisions from idea to production.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

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

LOCATION

On-site in San Francisco, California.