Founding ML Researcher

About the Role

Join an early-stage industrial AI startup as a founding member of its engineering team. You will build production multimodal AI for wearable devices, helping field professionals work through complex inspections and operational procedures with real-time visual assistance.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship agentic vision-language model pipelines for wearable devices and industrial workflows.

• Develop evaluation tools, capture failure cases, and use field data to improve model quality with each release.

• Adapt model serving and edge inference for 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 deployments.

What We're Looking For

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

• Hands-on experience owning production model and orchestration systems, including multi-step tool-using agents, evaluation design, and model improvement workflows.

• Applied computer vision experience beyond language-only AI, including visual reasoning and relevant detection or segmentation methods.

• Experience fine-tuning models with methods such as SFT or RLHF, and optimizing inference through quantization or serving tools such as vLLM, Triton, or TensorRT.

• Background in a startup, an early engineering team, or another fast-paced product environment; a strong technical degree or equivalent record of shipped AI work.

• Interest or experience in wearables, industrial AI, augmented reality, edge deployment, or autonomous systems is valuable.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $180,000 to $230,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.