Founding ML Researcher

About the Role Join the founding applied AI engineering team at an industrial AI startup building wearable copilots for field work. You will develop and ship multimodal AI systems that provide real-time assistance across complex industrial workflows. What You'll Do Build production agentic vision-language model pipelines for visual reasoning and tool use in industrial workflows. Develop evaluation tools, capture model failures, and create data and fine-tuning processes that improve 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 assistance. Fine-tune and optimize open-source models for enterprise and on-premise deployment. What We're Looking For Zero to three years of experience shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems to real users. Strong Python and PyTorch skills, with experience in agentic tool-use loops, evaluation design, and model orchestration. Applied experience with vision-language models, computer vision, and fine-tuning methods such as SFT or RLHF; this role focuses on deployment and applied model work rather than pretraining from scratch. Familiarity with tools and approaches such as vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, quantization, and edge inference. A degree in computer science, machine learning, or engineering, or equivalent experience building production AI systems. Startup or other fast-paced engineering experience, and a strong interest in computer vision, wearables, and industrial applications. Experience with AR or wearable AI, autonomous systems, or on-premise model deployment is a plus. Compensation & Benefits Base salary: $180,000 to $230,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available. Location On-site in San Francisco, United States.