Founding ML Researcher

About the Role

Join the founding engineering team at an early-stage industrial wearable AI startup. You will build and ship applied multimodal AI for smart glasses, helping field technicians work through complex operational tasks with real-time assistance.

What You'll Do

• Build production agentic vision-language model pipelines that use multi-step reasoning and tools to support industrial workflows such as inspections and standard operating procedures.

• Develop evaluation frameworks, capture failure cases, and create data and fine-tuning loops that improve model quality with each release.

• Adapt model orchestration and edge inference to varying connectivity, latency, and hardware constraints, including graceful fallbacks.

• Create real-time voice and video interfaces with conversational and proactive assistance modes.

• Fine-tune open-weight multimodal models using methods such as supervised fine-tuning and RLHF, and prepare them for on-premise deployments.

What We're Looking For

• Zero to three years of experience building and shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems, with end-to-end ownership of models and orchestration.

• Strong Python and PyTorch skills, plus experience with agent tool-use loops, evaluation design, and data flywheels.

• Applied experience with model fine-tuning, vision-language reasoning, and production deployment. This role is focused on shipped systems, not pretraining alone.

• Familiarity with serving and optimization tools such as vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, quantization, or edge AI.

• Startup or high-intensity engineering experience, and a degree in computer science, machine learning, or engineering, or equivalent demonstrated experience.

• Interest or experience in computer vision, wearables, industrial AI, augmented reality, or autonomous systems. Graduate-level vision or multimodal research is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $180,000 to $230,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, United States.