Founding ML Research Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 5, 2026. First seen by Alion on Nov 4, 2026.
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.