Founding ML Research Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE Join an early-stage industrial AI team building wearable AI copilots for field technicians in critical infrastructure. You will own key parts of the multimodal stack, from production vision-language systems and evaluation to edge inference and real-time voice and video experiences. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build and ship agentic vision-language pipelines for smart glasses, including visual reasoning and tool use across real industrial workflows. - Develop evaluation systems, capture failure cases, and create data and fine-tuning workflows that improve model quality over time. - Adapt model orchestration and edge inference to changing connectivity, latency, and hardware constraints. - Create real-time voice and video interfaces, including conversational and proactive alert experiences. - Fine-tune and optimize open-weight multimodal models for enterprise and on-premise deployments. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Two to six years of experience shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems, using Python and PyTorch. - Experience owning model and orchestration layers, delivering end-user products, and taking responsibility for product outcomes. - Hands-on work with multi-step agents and tool use, evaluation design, data flywheels, and fine-tuning methods such as SFT or RLHF. - Strong applied computer vision and vision-language experience, with production deployment beyond research or pretraining alone. - Startup, founding-engineer, or similarly high-ownership experience, plus a track record of driving greenfield work independently. - A relevant bachelor's or master's degree, or equivalent engineering experience; experience with wearables, AR, autonomous systems, edge inference, or on-premise serving is valuable. - Familiarity with tools such as vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, Hugging Face Transformers, and model quantization. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary is $180,000 to $230,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available. Equity details were not provided. LOCATION On-site, five days per week in San Francisco, California, United States.