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.