Founding ML Researcher

Founding ML Researcher San Francisco, CA · On-site · Full-time Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 0.1%–1% equity About the Company A seed‑stage AI company converting complex, unstructured documents into clean, LLM‑ready structured data. Production‑grade APIs ingest, parse, structure, and split documents across formats (PDF, PPT, Excel) into Markdown and JSON that AI agents and LLMs can work with reliably — preserving document structure and hierarchy while capturing the domain‑specific context critical for high‑stakes workflows in finance, legal, and healthcare. Founded 2024 · 1–10 people · Industry: AI Tools / Document AI The Role Founding ML Researcher shaping the company's ML research direction and translating cutting‑edge research into production‑ready document‑AI models. Research‑heavy but product‑oriented — you'll be comfortable moving between theory, experimentation, and real‑world deployment, with full ownership from idea to production. What you’ll be doing Own the end‑to‑end ML lifecycle: research experimentation training evaluation production deployment Work with the engineering team to transition research into deployed, scalable systems Drive best practices for data, experimentation, evaluation, and model iteration Work directly with the founders to shape product direction and engineering strategy Tech stack: VLM‑based document understanding, layout models, document parsing of unstructured data, and production model serving / inference optimization. Requirements Training and deploying state‑of‑the‑art models for parsing and understanding unstructured data Experimenting with novel techniques to improve layout models and VLM‑based document understanding Building data pipelines, evaluating model performance, and integrating models into production systems Green Flags Experience at top research labs like DeepMind, OpenAI Strong publication record in computer vision/ML Hands‑on implementation and production experience Red Flags Candidates whose recent focus has been management, rather than individual contributor work No hands‑on experience training AI models Why Join Define the technical archetype for a small, talent‑dense founding team Full ownership of the ML lifecycle, from research through production Direct collaboration with the founders on product and ML strategy Ship models used in high‑stakes finance, legal, and healthcare workflows Competitive comp + equity, full health insurance, DoorDash/Uber credits, company laptop Details Location: San Francisco, CA Work policy: On‑site Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 0.1%–1% equity Experience: Any (new PhD grads are acceptable) Visa sponsorship: H-1B, O-1, OPT Employment type: Full‑time #J-18808-Ljbffr David Joseph & Company