Founding Engineer – ML Research

About this role

A Series A/B AI startup in Mountain View seeks a Founding ML Research Engineer to build their research infrastructure from scratch. You'll design and train cutting-edge models (LLMs, diffusion, RL), develop scalable experimentation pipelines, and bridge research insights into production systems while establishing technical standards for the early team.

What you'll do

• Design, train, and evaluate ML models including Transformers, diffusion models, and domain-specific architectures
• Build and maintain scalable experimentation pipelines for data, model training, and evaluation workflows
• Collaborate with data and infrastructure teams to optimize training throughput and model quality
• Rapidly prototype research ideas and productionize them into deployment-ready systems
• Contribute to open research, internal benchmarks, and emerging techniques in multimodal and generative AI
• Establish foundational technical culture, documentation standards, and reproducibility practices

What they're looking for

• Python and ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow)
• Transformer architectures and fine-tuning
• Diffusion models and generative AI
• RLHF and reinforcement learning techniques
• Experimentation pipeline design and MLOps
• Model evaluation and benchmarking
• Research-to-production translation
• Multimodal and synthetic data techniques

Benefits

• Base salary $220,000–$300,000 annually
• Equity participation as a founding team member
• Opportunity to shape research direction and technical culture from inception
• Work with frontier AI labs and cutting-edge models
• Remote flexibility (within on-site requirement in Mountain View)