<h3>About the Role</h3><p style="min-height:1.5em">A well-funded Series A AI/ML platform company is looking for a <strong>Founding Engineer — ML Research</strong> to build and scale its research backbone. You'll bridge applied machine learning and systems engineering, turning cutting-edge ideas into reliable, production-ready models. As an early team member, you'll have direct impact on model performance, data quality, and the company's core technical foundations in generative and multimodal AI.</p><h3>What You'll Do</h3><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Design, train, and evaluate ML models — including LLMs, diffusion models, and domain-specific architectures.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Develop scalable experimentation pipelines spanning data ingestion, model training, and evaluation workflows.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Collaborate with data and infrastructure teams to optimize training throughput and model quality.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Contribute to open research, internal benchmarks, and new techniques in multimodal and generative AI.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Rapidly prototype research ideas and productionize them into usable models and tools.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Define and promote standards for research rigor, documentation, and reproducibility across the engineering org.</p></li></ul><h3>What We're Looking For</h3><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>3–10 years</strong> of experience in ML research, applied ML, or ML systems engineering.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Deep familiarity with <strong>PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow</strong> and hands-on experience with architectures such as Transformers, Diffusion models, or RLHF.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Strong foundations in data processing, distributed training, and evaluation metrics.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Demonstrated ability to move from research papers to working prototypes to production-ready code.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Curiosity about emerging ML paradigms — multimodality, self-learning, synthetic data, and agentic systems.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Passion for building from zero to one in a high-velocity startup environment.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Nice to have:</strong> Open research contributions, published benchmarks, or peer-reviewed publications in relevant ML research areas.</p></li></ul><h3>Compensation &amp; Benefits</h3><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Salary:</strong> $220,000 – $300,000 USD annually</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Equity participation as a founding team member</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Visa sponsorship:</strong> Not available — candidates must be authorized to work in the US</p></li></ul><h3>Location</h3><p style="min-height:1.5em">This is an <strong>on-site role