Founding ML Researcher

About the Role

Join an early-stage industrial wearable AI team as a founding ML researcher, building the multimodal AI systems behind smart-glasses assistance for field technicians. You will own applied model development and deployment, helping bring real-time visual assistance to complex industrial work.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship production vision-language model pipelines with multi-step reasoning and tool use for industrial workflows.

• Develop evaluation harnesses, capture failure cases, and create data feedback loops that improve model quality.

• Optimize inference and adapt model orchestration to changing connectivity, latency, and hardware constraints.

• Build real-time voice and video interfaces, including conversational and proactive assistance.

• Fine-tune open-weight models for enterprise deployment, using methods such as supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and quantization.

What We're Looking For

• 0 to 3 years of experience shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems, with strong Python and PyTorch skills.

• Experience owning model and orchestration layers, building agent loops with real tool use, and developing evaluation systems and data feedback loops.

• Applied expertise in fine-tuning and deploying vision-language models, rather than a focus solely on pretraining.

• Background in computer vision, wearables, industrial AI, autonomous systems, or related applied areas, with evidence of building for real users.

• Experience with edge or on-premise inference is valuable, including tools such as vLLM, Triton, TensorRT, ONNX, or model quantization.

• A degree in computer science, machine learning, or engineering, or equivalent experience demonstrated through shipped AI systems.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation is $180,000 to $230,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California.