Founding ML Research Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 2, 2026. First seen by Alion on Nov 1, 2026.
About the Role
Join an early-stage industrial AI team building wearable AI copilots for field technicians. As a founding engineering team member, you will own core multimodal systems that provide real-time assistance in complex work environments.
What You'll Do
Build and ship agentic vision-language model pipelines for smart glasses and industrial workflows.
Develop evaluation harnesses, capture failure modes, and create data and fine-tuning loops to improve model quality.
Adapt model orchestration and inference for changing connectivity, latency, and edge hardware constraints.
Create real-time voice and video interfaces, including conversational and proactive assistance modes.
Fine-tune open-weight multimodal models for enterprise deployments, including supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and quantization.
What We're Looking For
Typically 2 to 6 years of experience shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems, with Python and PyTorch.
Experience owning product outcomes and delivering AI systems to end users, including multi-step agents with real tool use.
Strong applied expertise in model orchestration, visual reasoning, fine-tuning, evaluation, and data workflows.
Experience with tools and frameworks such as vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, ONNX, TensorRT, Hugging Face Transformers, and Docker.
Background in edge inference, on-premise deployment, wearable AI, augmented reality, autonomous driving vision, or industrial AI is valuable.
Strong CS, machine learning, or engineering fundamentals, plus startup, founding-team, or similarly fast-paced product-building experience.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $180,000 to $230,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California.