Founding ML Engineer

Who we are Founders Sid Choudhury (CEO) : As SVP & GM at Harness, Sid ran the core platform that powers the flagship CI/CD, Cloud Cost Management, and Feature Flags products and built the Developer Experience and Application Security business units from the ground up. He shaped the open source and commercial offerings of Yugabyte as SVP of Product and was the first PM at AppDynamics. Utkarsh Ohm (CTO) has built distributed systems and applied AI to build two products from scratch at ThoughtSpot - SpotIQ/KPI Monitor (insight mining engine) and Spotter (AI analyst, company's flagship product). He also built a location dev tool as founding engineer and an investment platform for young adults as cofounder/CTO. Puneet Saraswat (CDO) : As one of the first engineers and later VP Eng at Harness, he led the creation of numerous products and led teams for Internal Developer Portal, Cloud Development Environments, Security Test Orchestration, Core Platform, and Developer Productivity. At Microsoft, he built Application Gateway, a critical Layer 7 Load balancing and Web Application Firewall service of Azure from scratch. Mission More craft, less toil for engineers. Unfortunately, engineers spend more than 70% of their time toiling not crafting. We envision a future where a small team of generalist developers will orchestrate a large team of AI engineering agents to do the mundane for them. We are building the platform for that future for both humans and machines. Logistics We are located in San Mateo downtown, next to the caltrain station and work from the office 4 days/week. Candidates must have existing U.S. work authorization. We can sponsor visa transfers (e.g., H-1B), but cannot support new visa applications at this time. Values Agency over consensus: We take initiative and accountability and deliver end-to-end. Live in the future: We push our boundaries to reimagine and practice how engineering will be done in 2030. Improvement over perfection: We treat everything — code, process, ourselves — as a work in progress. Toolmakers, not gatekeepers: We empower builders, not constrain them. Who You Are We are looking for a staff+ engineer with strong model training skills who can work directly with the founders to bring our vision to life. What You'll Do Explore novel & implement latest research in retrieval, search, reasoning and tool calling to orchestrate agents Define and run RL experiments to leverage large swathes of organizational context trapped across tools like github, docs, ci/cd tools Shape the strategy: Work in a tight loop with founders and early customers to prove out technical feasibility and consistency Requirements Master's/ PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or a related field 8+ years of hands-on experience in a research org with pytorch/tensorflow and transformer models Familiar with methods of training and fine-tuning LLMs, such as distillation, SFT, RL and policy optimization Energized by the open questions and whitespace that exists in the early days of building a product and company Proven ability to work autonomously in a fast-paced startup environment Leverage Cursor, Claude Code, Coderabbit, Warp etc to build We'd Love to See Experience shipping models for search relevance, ads ranking, recommendation systems or computer vision. Prior experience building or applying models for coding. Open Source contributions or github projects that demonstrate your passion and skill. What We Offer Up to $250k in cash and 1% in equity. Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance. Stipend for using AI tools of your choice. The opportunity to define a company's culture, product, and future from day one.