{"id":712768,"url":"https://alion.io/job/eqltech-founding-ai-engineer-computer-vision","title":"Founding AI Engineer (Computer Vision)","company":{"id":673135,"name":"EQL Tech","domain":"eqltech.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/eqltech","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":27,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":126,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Burlingame, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":180000,"max":240000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":240000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"Edge AI","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"ServiceNow","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Time Series","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"VLM","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-28T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-28","last_verified_at":"2026-11-05T03:13:56Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":100,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":100},"description":"Founding AI Engineer (Computer Vision)\nOn-site · Engineering, Product & Tech · Full time San Francisco, California, United States\nOur client is a stealth, seed-stage startup building an AI-powered wearable platform for industrial field technicians - running a real-time computer-vision and agentic AI system directly on smart-glasses hardware, live today with major data-center, energy, and industrial customers across multiple countries. Backed by a $5M seed round and founded by researchers from Harvard/NASA (computer vision, published at NeurIPS and ICCV) and MIT (machine learning, ex-quant researcher).\nThe bet: computer vision and agentic vision-language models (VLMs) grounded in real integrations with legacy enterprise systems (ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce) - not another LLM wrapper. The industrial data this generates is also laying the groundwork for robotics automation down the line.\nAs Founding AI Engineer, you'll own the AI core: an agentic vision-language model (VLM) system doing multimodal visual reasoning, evals, and model orchestration, running on real hardware against real industrial workflows - not benchmark demos.\nWhat you'll do\nBuild and ship agentic VLM systems that reliably do visual reasoning in production (detection, segmentation, image/video understanding)\nOwn model orchestration and build real evals discipline (ground-truth, trajectory, or regression harnesses)\nWork directly with the founding team, shaping the AI roadmap from day one\nLocation & culture\nFully on-site in the SF Bay Area. The founding team lives and works together for the first several months in a shared house before moving to a standard office - expect an intense, in-person, roughly 9-9-6 pace. Hours flex for exceptional, senior talent; the priority is getting the right person, not saving on salary.\nRequirements\nEssential\n1-5 years applied AI/ML experience, ideally computer vision or multimodal - a practical builder, not a career academic\nHas shipped multimodal/CV systems to production in the VLM era, owning the model layer end-to-end\nApplied VLM/multimodal engineering specifically - vision-language, not sensor-fusion, audio-only, or time-series\nApplied agentic AI/model orchestration plus real evals discipline\nStartup or AI-team production experience, ideally as founder/CTO/founding engineer\nParticularly valuable\nEdge/on-device inference; on-prem serving and fine-tuning (vLLM, SFT, quantization)\nRAG against knowledge bases\nProduction AR/wearable AI or autonomous-driving CV experience\nIndustrial domain exposure\nBenefits\nCompensation & benefits\nBase: $180K-$240K\nEquity: 0.25%-0.75%\nVisa sponsorship available (O-1, TN, E-3, H-1B1, H-1B transfer, F-1 OPT/STEM OPT)\nHow to apply: resume plus a short description of the most complex production VLM/CV system you've shipped.","description_format":"text","description_chars":2796,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Robotic Software & Control Systems","Recruiting & Staffing"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-11T05:11:59Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":55,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.736,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":99,"expected_fill_days":126,"reasons":["conf:1","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":240000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/eqltech-founding-ai-engineer-computer-vision","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/eqltech-founding-ai-engineer-computer-vision.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-05T05:41:45Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":6724,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-06T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":673135},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=673135"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Feqltech-founding-ai-engineer-computer-vision"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Feqltech-founding-ai-engineer-computer-vision"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Feqltech-founding-ai-engineer-computer-vision"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/eqltech-founding-ai-engineer-computer-vision\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Feqltech-founding-ai-engineer-computer-vision"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":712768}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"eqltech.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":712768},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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