Founding Machine Learning Engineer Onsite San Francisco CA

Founding Machine Learning Engineer -  On-site - San Francisco, CA

Location: San Francisco, CA

Schedule: In office, five days per week

A well-funded seed-stage AI company is building advanced agentic systems that automate complex workflows inside real enterprise software. The team is developing multimodal, vision-language, and reinforcement learning models that operate in high-stakes environments, beginning with healthcare. This is a founding-level opportunity to shape the technical direction of a company working at the frontier of applied AI.

The engineering team is small, highly technical, and composed of builders from top research institutions and high-bar technology companies. This role is ideal for someone who wants to work on ambitious problems, ship production systems, and contribute to a platform with national-level impact.

Role Overview

The Founding Machine Learning Engineer will design, train, and deploy models that power real-world autonomous agents. This includes multimodal perception, model reliability, reinforcement learning, evaluation systems, and the infrastructure required to operate AI agents safely inside enterprise environments. The work is deeply applied and requires strong engineering discipline, creativity, and comfort with first-principles problem solving.

What You Will Work On

• Develop and train multimodal and vision-language models for real enterprise workflows.
• Build reinforcement learning systems that improve grounding, reliability, and recovery.
• Design evaluation frameworks, regression detection, and error analysis pipelines.
• Create synthetic data systems and tooling to improve model performance.
• Collaborate with engineering to deploy model-powered systems into production.
• Invent new infrastructure for agentic workflows and model-driven automation.
• Contribute to a high-ownership environment where ideas move quickly into shipped products.

Ideal Background

• Strong experience in applied machine learning or AI engineering.
• Hands-on experience training models, fine-tuning, or working with reinforcement learning.
• Proficiency in Python and the ability to write production-quality code.
• Experience with multimodal systems, perception models, or LLM-powered products.
• Ability to design evaluation systems, analyze failure modes, and iterate quickly.
• Comfort working in ambiguous, high-ownership environments.
• Strong CS fundamentals and engineering rigor.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in computer vision or vision-language modeling.
• Research publications or notable ML projects.
• Background from a high-bar engineering organization or top academic program.
• Strong mathematical foundation or competitive math experience.
• Interest in entrepreneurship or building toward a future founding role.

Who Will Thrive Here

• Engineers who enjoy building applied AI systems that ship to production.
• Individuals who think from first principles and can invent new approaches.
• Builders who value reliability, safety, and disciplined engineering.
• People who want to work on complex, meaningful problems with immediate impact.
• Those who want to join a small, fast-moving team at a pivotal stage of growth.

Compensation and Benefits

• $200,000 to $250,000 base.
• Top candidates may be considered up to $275,000.
• Competitive equity included.
• Highly attractive equity package at the founding team level.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits. 401(k) program.
• Significant opportunity for career growth and technical leadership.

Compensation:
$200,000-$250,000 per year