Founding ML Researcher San Francisco, CA 200K-300K

Location: San Francisco CA (in-person 5-6 days a week)

Compensation: $200000 - $300000 per year plus equity (flexible above range for exceptional candidates)

Join a fast-growing AI startup as a Founding ML Researcher defining the engineering archetype for a small talent-dense team building production-ready document AI models.

What Youll Own

- Shape the companys ML research direction and translate research into production-ready document AI models

- Own the end-to-end ML lifecycle: research experimentation training evaluation and production deployment

- Work with the engineering team to transition research into deployed scalable systems

- Drive best practices for data experimentation evaluation and model iteration

What Youll Bring

- Experience training and deploying state-of-the-art models for parsing and understanding unstructured data

- Comfort experimenting with novel techniques to improve layout models and VLM-based document understanding

- Experience building data pipelines evaluating model performance and integrating models into production systems

- Willingness to work directly with the founders to shape product direction and engineering strategy

- Comfort moving fluidly between theory experimentation and real-world deployment

Nice to Have

- PhD or equivalent research experience in VLM computer vision or related areas

- Publications in top-tier AI conferences

- Familiarity with model serving inference optimization or deployment at scale

This is a true founding research seat: an opportunity to set the technical bar for a small talent-dense team and shape how a fast-moving AI company builds and ships frontier document understanding models.