Founding Machine Learning Researcher - AI-First Company

About the Role

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

Requirements

• This role is research-intensive but demands a product-focused mindset.
• 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.
• A proactive, ownership-driven mindset with the ability to independently drive systems from concept to production.

Nice to 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.

What We Offer

• Salary: $200,000 – $300,000.
• Equity: Up to 2%.
• Visa sponsorship available.
• Opportunity to shape the future of AI at a revolutionary company.
• Join a culture of innovation, ownership, and collaboration.