AI Engineer / AI Scientist

Member of Technical Staff, Machine Learning

Location: San Francisco, CA
Employment Type: Full-Time
Work Arrangement: Onsite

About the Company

Our client is an early-stage AI startup building next-generation machine learning systems that transform large-scale multimodal data into structured intelligence for real-world applications.

Working at the intersection of foundation models, computer vision and robotics, the team is developing cutting-edge Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and multimodal AI systems capable of understanding complex video and sensor data at scale. Their technology supports customers solving challenging problems across autonomy, robotics and industrial AI.

The founding team brings deep expertise in large-scale machine learning, distributed systems, AI infrastructure and applied research, with experience building production AI systems and publishing at leading machine learning conferences.

About the Role

We're looking for an exceptional Machine Learning Engineer / Member of Technical Staff to help develop state-of-the-art multimodal AI systems.

This role sits at the intersection of frontier AI research and production engineering, focusing on training, fine-tuning and deploying large-scale Vision-Language Models capable of understanding motion and real-world environments from video data.

You'll work directly with a highly technical founding team, helping shape both the research roadmap and the core machine learning platform from an early stage.

Responsibilities

• Train, fine-tune and evaluate large-scale Vision-Language Models and multimodal foundation models.
• Design and optimize GPU-accelerated training, inference and evaluation pipelines.
• Develop multimodal architectures capable of reasoning over video, language and sensor data.
• Build evaluation frameworks for benchmarking model performance across complex reasoning tasks.
• Develop scalable data curation pipelines that improve model quality through automated dataset generation.
• Collaborate closely with leadership to take research ideas from experimentation into production.
• Contribute to cutting-edge research while building production-ready AI systems.

Required Experience

• Strong Python and PyTorch development experience.
• Experience training or fine-tuning foundation models, Vision-Language Models or other multimodal AI systems.
• Strong understanding of modern deep learning workflows and large-scale experimentation.
• Experience working with video, image or sensor-based machine learning datasets.
• Knowledge of embeddings, retrieval systems and GPU optimization techniques.
• Ability to work independently in a fast-paced startup environment.

Preferred Experience

• Publications or research experience in machine learning, computer vision or multimodal AI.
• Experience with distributed training, vector databases or ML orchestration platforms.
• Contributions to open-source machine learning frameworks.
• Previous experience within robotics, autonomous systems or computer vision.

Why Join?

• Build frontier AI technology with real-world impact.
• Work directly alongside an experienced technical founding team.
• Significant ownership over both research and engineering decisions.
• Opportunity to influence the direction of an ambitious, early-stage AI company.
• Competitive compensation package including meaningful equity.