Founding Machine Learning Researcher, AI-first Company

Are you ready to take the leap into a pivotal role where your work shapes the foundation of an AI-first company? We are seeking a Founding Machine Learning Researcher to join a small, high-performing team in San Francisco.

This role is designed to evolve into the Head of AI position as the company scales, giving you not only the opportunity to lead but to define the future of AI at the organization.This is your chance to be part of something transformative—and to build systems that make a real-world impact.

What You’ll Be Doing

As a Founding Machine Learning Researcher, you’ll play a central role in defining the company’s ML research direction and translating cutting-edge research into production-ready AI models. You’ll drive innovation, take full ownership of the ML lifecycle, and set the technical standards for the team as it grows.Your responsibilities will include:

• Leading the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle: from research and experimentation to training, evaluation, and scalable production deployment.
• Developing state-of-the-art AI systems for parsing and understanding unstructured data.
• Collaborating with the engineering team to integrate research into scalable, real-world systems.
• Establishing and driving best practices for data pipelines, model iteration, and performance evaluation.

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• Working closely with the founders to shape product direction and engineering strategy.

What We’re Looking For

This role is research-intensive but demands a product-focused mindset. We are seeking individuals who thrive at the intersection of theory and application. You should feel equally at home designing experiments as you do deploying real-world solutions.

Key skills and qualifications:

• Proven experience in training and deploying state-of-the-art models for unstructured data understanding.
• Familiarity with techniques to improve layout models and vision-language model (VLM)-based document understanding.
• Expertise in building data pipelines, evaluating model performance, and integrating models into production systems.

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• A proactive, ownership-driven mindset with the ability to independently drive systems from concept to production.

Bonus points if you have:

• A PhD or equivalent research experience in Computer Vision, VLM, or related areas.
• Publications in top-tier AI conferences.
• Knowledge of model serving, inference optimization, or large-scale deployment.

Why Join Us?

We believe technical excellence compounds with every hire, and as one of the first team members, you’ll have an outsized impact on the company’s success. This is not just another engineering role; it’s an opportunity to set the foundation for an AI team and build something truly transformative.Our team is small but exceptional, and we’re committed to fostering a culture of innovation, ownership, and collaboration.

Your success here can define your career and create meaningful impact in the AI space.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary: $200,000 – $300,000
• Equity: Up to 2%
• Location: In-person, San Francisco
• Visa: Sponsorship available

If you’re ready to push the boundaries of AI research and deployment while shaping the future of a revolutionary company, we’d love to hear from you.