Founding ML Researcher

About the Role

Join the founding engineering team at a seed-stage industrial wearable AI startup as a Founding ML Researcher. You will build and ship the multimodal AI systems behind smart-glasses assistants, helping field technicians work through real industrial procedures, inspections, and other complex tasks.

What You'll Do

• Build production agentic vision-language model pipelines that support multi-step visual reasoning and tool use across industrial workflows.

• Create evaluation frameworks, capture model failure modes, and develop data and fine-tuning loops that improve quality with each release.

• Adapt model orchestration and inference for field connectivity, varied latency budgets, and edge deployment, including graceful fallbacks.

• Develop real-time voice and video interactions for smart glasses, including conversational and proactive alert experiences.

• Fine-tune and optimize multimodal models for enterprise deployments, including on-premise environments.

What We're Looking For

• 0 to 3 years of relevant experience, with strong applied machine learning and computer science fundamentals.

• Experience shipping agentic or multimodal AI systems to real users, beyond prototype demonstrations.

• Proficiency with Python and tools such as PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, and Docker.

• Familiarity with vision-language models, multimodal LLMs, RAG, LangChain, edge AI, and model serving or runtime optimization.

• Experience or interest in supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, quantization methods such as GPTQ or AWQ, computer vision, wearables, or applied AI for industrial environments.

Compensation & Benefits

The annual salary range is $180,000 to $230,000 USD. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, California, United States.