Founding AI Engineer (Computer Vision)

About the role

A stealth, seed-stage startup is hiring a Founding AI Engineer (Computer Vision) for its on-site, full-time position in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company builds an AI-powered wearable platform for industrial field technicians, running a real-time computer-vision and agentic AI system on smart-glasses hardware, backed by a $5M seed round and founded by researchers from Harvard/NASA and MIT.

Key responsibilities

• Build and ship agentic vision-language model (VLM) systems that perform visual reasoning in production (detection, segmentation, image and video understanding)
• Own model orchestration and build a real evaluation discipline (ground-truth, trajectory or regression harnesses)
• Work directly with the founding team, shaping the AI roadmap from day one

Required profile

• 1-5 years of applied AI/ML experience, ideally computer vision or multimodal, with a practical, hands-on approach
• Experience shipping multimodal/CV systems to production in the VLM era, owning the model layer end-to-end
• Applied VLM/multimodal engineering and agentic AI/model orchestration, plus real evaluation discipline
• Startup or AI-team production experience, ideally as founder, CTO or founding engineer

Required skills

• Vision-language models and multimodal systems
• Model orchestration and evaluation harnesses
• Particularly valuable: edge/on-device inference, on-prem serving and fine-tuning (vLLM, SFT, quantization), RAG, production AR/wearable AI or autonomous-driving CV, industrial domain exposure

What we offer

• Base salary of $180,000-$240,000 and equity of 0.25%-0.75%
• Visa sponsorship available (O-1, TN, E-3, H-1B1, H-1B transfer, F-1 OPT/STEM OPT)
• Fully on-site work in the Bay Area, with flexible hours for exceptional senior talent

To apply, send a resume and a short description of the most complex production VLM/CV system you have shipped.