Founding ML Researcher

Education Shipped agentic VLM / multimodal vision systems to real users in production — not demos, not pure research. Owned the model + orchestration layer end- to- end. Must be vision- language multimodality (images/video + VLM), not sensor- fusion or audio- only. Applied VLM engineering: shipped and hardened vision- language models in production — visual reasoning, detection/segmentation as needed. Depth in applied fine- tuning (SFT, RLHF), eval design, and model orchestration, not pretraining from scratch. Must work on - site 5 days/week in San Francisco. Ideally open to living in a hacker house.0 - 3 years of experience shipping production VLM / multimodal AI systems, using Python and PyTorchStartup or founding- engineer experience(founder, CTO, eng #1–5) OR high- intensity company (Meta Reality Labs, Anduril, SpaceX, top YC). Long single big- tech tenure with no builder signal and no relevant- team work is a negative. Education BS or MS in CS, ML, or Engineeringfrom a strong program, OR demonstrated equivalent via shipped production AI systems. Agentic AI with real tool- use: built multi- step agent loops (not RAG wrappers or single- turn chatbots). Experience with eval harnesses and data flywheels. Genuinely mission- aligned with computer vision, wearables, and industrial AI — not just chasing LLM trends. Evidenced by project choices, side work, or career trajectory. Nice-to-have Production AR / wearable AI (Meta Reality Labs, Snap Spectacles, Apple Vision Pro) or autonomous driving CV (Waymo, Cruise, Aurora).Education Master's with vision or multimodal research component (published work or thesis).Edge inference / on- prem model deployment (vLLM, Triton, TensorRT, quantization). Serving open- weight models on constrained hardware.