Founding Engineer – ML Research

About this role

A Series A AI/ML platform company seeks a Founding Engineer to lead ML research and systems development, focusing on LLMs, diffusion models, and multimodal AI. You'll own the full pipeline from experimental design through production deployment, while establishing research standards and reproducibility practices across the engineering org.

What you'll do

• Design, train, and evaluate ML models including LLMs, diffusion models, and domain-specific architectures
• Build scalable experimentation pipelines for data ingestion, model training, and evaluation workflows
• Optimize training throughput and model quality in collaboration with data and infrastructure teams
• Prototype research ideas rapidly and productionize them into reliable, deployable systems
• Contribute to open research, internal benchmarks, and novel techniques in generative and multimodal AI
• Establish and enforce standards for research rigor, documentation, and reproducibility

What they're looking for

• PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow (deep expertise)
• Transformer architectures and diffusion models
• RLHF and reinforcement learning techniques
• Distributed training and large-scale ML systems
• Data processing and evaluation metrics design
• Research-to-production code translation
• Multimodal and generative AI paradigms
• Experimental design and benchmarking

Benefits

• Salary: $220,000–$300,000 USD annually
• Equity participation as a founding team member
• Direct technical impact on core product and research direction
• Work with cutting-edge generative and multimodal AI models
• On-site collaboration in San Francisco Bay Area