Founding ML Researcher
$200k - $300kDavid Joseph & Company
Job Description
Job Description
San Francisco, CA · On-site · Full-time Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 0.1%–1% equity
About the CompanyOur client converts complex documents into LLM-ready data. Its production-grade APIs ingest, parse, structure, and split documents across formats (PDF, PPT, Excel) into clean Markdown and JSON that AI agents and LLMs can work with reliably from day one. The platform preserves document structure and hierarchy while capturing the domain-specific context critical for high-stakes workflows across finance, legal, and healthcare.
Founded 2024 · 1–10 people (Seed) · Industry: AI Tools / Document AI
The RoleA Founding ML Researcher shaping the client's ML research direction and translating cutting-edge research into production-ready document-AI models. Research-heavy but product-oriented — comfortable moving between theory, experimentation, and real-world deployment.
Tech stack: VLM-based document understanding, layout models, parsing of unstructured data, and production model serving / inference optimization.
What you'll be doing
- Train and deploy state-of-the-art models for parsing and understanding unstructured data
- Experiment with novel techniques to improve layout models and VLM-based document understanding
- Build data pipelines, evaluate model performance, and integrate models into production systems
- A strong ML / computer-vision research background
- Hands-on implementation and production experience
- Comfortable moving between theory, experimentation, and deployment
- Experience at top research labs (e.g., DeepMind, OpenAI)
- A strong publication record in computer vision / ML
- Define the technical ceiling: this role sets the research archetype for a small, talent-dense founding team
- End-to-end ownership: own the full ML lifecycle — research, experimentation, training, evaluation, production deployment
- Direct founder access: work directly with the founders to shape product direction and long-term ML strategy
- Real production impact: ship document-AI models used in high-stakes finance, legal, and healthcare workflows
- Perks: competitive comp + equity, full health insurance, meal/ride credits, company laptop
- Location — San Francisco, CA
- Work policy — On-site
- Compensation — $200,000–$300,000 + 0.1%–1% equity
- Visa sponsorship — Available (H-1B, O-1, OPT)
- Employment type — Full-time
Vacancy posted 17 days ago
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