{"id":3648223,"url":"https://alion.io/job/tonal-staff-machine-learning-engineer-sensors-intelligence","title":"Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Sensors & Intelligence","company":{"id":6758,"name":"Tonal","domain":"tonal.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/tonal","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Toronto, Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":["US","CA"],"hiring_countries_total":2,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":185000,"currency":"CAD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":132422},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"Edge AI","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"Localization","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Self-Supervised Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Sensor Fusion","optional":false},{"name":"TensorFlow","optional":false},{"name":"Time Series","optional":false},{"name":"MuJoCo","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-02T21:44:58Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-02","last_verified_at":"2026-11-08T23:19:15Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":6,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":6},"description":"Overview\nTonal is looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join our Sensors & Intelligence team and help build foundation models of human movement and physiology. You'll work where machine learning, biomechanics, physiology, and computer vision meet. You'll have access to the largest strength training dataset in the world: millions of workouts captured through cable force and position sensors, cameras, and wearable trackers.\nYour job is to turn that multimodal data into general-purpose representations of how people move, exert effort, fatigue, and adapt over time. Those representations will power the next generation of Tonal's intelligence: adaptive coaching, form feedback, personalized progression, and advanced musculoskeletal health models. This role combines foundational research with work that reaches our members, and you'll help shape that balance as the team grows. You'll contribute to defining ML research directions, run rigorous experiments, and publish your work, while partnering with engineering to bring breakthroughs into the product.\nThis role is remote-first, based in Toronto, Ontario. We are open to candidates based in Canada and the US.\nWhat You Will Do\nLead research and development of multimodal foundation models that learn from synchronized sensor, video, and physiological signals\n\nDesign self-supervised pretraining strategies for long, heterogeneous time series data\n\nDevelop sensor fusion approaches that handle different sampling rates, sensor noise, synchronization error, and missing modalities\n\nAdvance computer vision methods for 2D and 3D human pose estimation, motion reconstruction, and movement quality assessment\n\nBuild models that estimate biomechanical and physiological quantities such as joint kinematics, load, effort, fatigue, and recovery\n\nDefine evaluation frameworks and benchmarks that measure how well models generalize across users, body types, movements, and equipment conditions\n\nValidate model outputs against gold-standard references such as motion capture, force plates, and clinical-grade physiological sensors\n\nWork with ML Engineering to adapt research models for cloud deployment and on-device inference\n\nPublish regularly at top venues and represent Tonal in the research community through papers, talks, and collaborations\n\nMentor scientists and engineers and help set the scientific direction of the Sensors & Intelligence team\n\nWho You Are\nA proven independent researcher with a strong track record of publications in relevant venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, IMWUT/UbiComp, CHI, IEEE TBME, J. Biomechanics, or similar)\n\nPhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Biomechanics, or a related field strongly preferred; we also welcome candidates whose research experience and publication record demonstrate equivalent depth\n\nDeep expertise in at least one of the following: sensor fusion, biomechanics, physiological signal modeling, or computer vision for human motion\n\nHands-on experience designing, training, and debugging transformer architectures, including attention mechanisms, positional encoding for time series, and multimodal tokenization\n\nProven ability to train and develop ML models end to end in PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow, from data curation through experimentation and analysis\n\nStrong grounding in signal processing, including filtering, calibration, time alignment, and frequency-domain analysis\n\nRigorous experimental design: you know how to build ablations, avoid leakage across subjects, and tell real gains from noise\n\nAbility to independently define and drive ambiguous research problems toward measurable product impact\n\nClear communicator who can explain complex findings to scientists, engineers, and product leaders\n\nExtra Credit\nExperience pretraining or scaling foundation models, including distributed training and an understanding of scaling behavior\n\nFamiliarity with musculoskeletal modeling tools (e.g., OpenSim, MuJoCo, MyoSim) or physics-informed ML\n\nExperience with wearable physiological signals such as IMU, PPG, HRV, or EMG data\n\nExperience with personalization, few-shot adaptation, or uncertainty quantification\n\nExperience with model compression or efficient architectures for edge deployment\n\nBackground in human subjects research, data collection protocols, or validation studies\n\nInterest in fitness, sports science, or digital health\n\nAt Tonal, we believe that the unique and varied lived experiences of our teammates contribute to our overall strength.\nAt Tonal, we believe that the unique and varied lived experiences of our teammates contribute to our overall strength. We don’t just appreciate differences, we celebrate them, and we always seek people that represent a wide variety of backgrounds. We’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and designing employee experiences that contribute to your growth as much as you do to ours. If your experience aligns with what we’re looking for (even if you don’t check every single box), send us your application. We would love to hear from you!\nTonal is committed to meeting the diverse needs of people with disabilities in a timely manner that is consistent with the principles of independence, dignity, integration, and equality of opportunity. Should you have any accommodation requests, please reach out to us via our confidential email, . All requests will be addressed and responded to in accordance with Tonal’s Accessibility Policy and local legislation.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5527,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"},{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Fitness","Smart Home Devices","Fitness Equipment"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-02T23:25:19Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":5,"expected_fill_days":60,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":132422,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/tonal-staff-machine-learning-engineer-sensors-intelligence","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/tonal-staff-machine-learning-engineer-sensors-intelligence.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-09T00:15:32Z","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":623,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-10T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"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":6758},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=6758"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Ftonal-staff-machine-learning-engineer-sensors-intelligence"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"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%2Ftonal-staff-machine-learning-engineer-sensors-intelligence"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"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%2Ftonal-staff-machine-learning-engineer-sensors-intelligence"},{"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/tonal-staff-machine-learning-engineer-sensors-intelligence\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Ftonal-staff-machine-learning-engineer-sensors-intelligence"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3648223}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"tonal.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3648223},"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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