Founding ML Research Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE Join an early-stage industrial AI startup as a founding engineer building the multimodal AI system for wearable assistants used in field operations. You will own key parts of the production vision-language stack, from model orchestration and evaluation to deployment on real-world hardware. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build production agentic vision-language pipelines that support multi-step visual reasoning and tool use in industrial workflows. - Develop evaluation frameworks, capture model failures, and create data and fine-tuning loops to improve model quality. - Adapt model orchestration and edge inference to variable connectivity, latency, and deployment constraints. - Create real-time voice and video interfaces, including conversational and proactive assistance features. - Fine-tune and optimize open-source 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, with ownership of model and orchestration components. - Strong Python and PyTorch skills, plus experience with tools such as vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, Hugging Face Transformers, Docker, and quantization methods. - Applied experience with supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, evaluation design, model serving, and deployment; pretraining from scratch is not the focus. - Experience building multi-step agents with real tool use, evaluation harnesses, and data improvement loops. - A record of shipping AI products for end users and taking ownership of product outcomes and technical decisions. - Background in computer science, machine learning, or engineering, with strong fundamentals; startup or other fast-paced product experience is valuable. - Interest or experience in computer vision, wearables, industrial AI, edge inference, or on-premise model deployment. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary is $180,000 to $230,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, United States.