Founding AI Engineer (Vision-language models) — San Francisco, CA

We're recruiting a Founding AI Engineer for an early-stage SF startup building AI smart glasses for field teams. Think technicians in data centers, energy and aerospace getting a co-pilot that sees what they see and walks them through the job.

You'd own the AI core: vision-language models running on real hardware, out in the field.

What you'd own:

• A production agentic VLM pipeline on the glasses: multi-step, tool-using visual reasoning against real inspections and procedures

• The eval and data flywheel: eval harnesses, failure capture, and customer data feeding fine-tunes that make each release better

• Edge inference and model orchestration that holds up when connectivity and latency get rough

• Real-time voice and video interfaces for the glasses

• Fine-tuning open models (SFT, RLHF, quantization) for on-prem deployments

Stack: Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face, vLLM, Triton, TensorRT, ONNX.

You're probably a fit if you have:

• Hands-on training, fine-tuning or post-training of a vision-language or video model. Not just prompting or calling an API.

• Done that work at a self-driving, robotics, AR, top AI lab or funded AI startup

• About a year or more of that work, or a paper at a top venue

• Built agent loops with real tool use, not just RAG or a chatbot

• You're based in the US and can be in the SF office 5 days a week

Who this isn't for:

• IT services, consulting or non-tech enterprise backgrounds

• A run of short startup stints under a year

• Pure researchers who've never shipped to real users

• Language-only LLM folks with no vision work

• Anyone outside the US right now

Pay: $180K to $230K base plus 0.25% to 0.75% equity.

Visa: OPT or H-1B transfers are fine. They can't sponsor a new visa.

This role is recruited by d8wa. Apply and we'll set up a quick 15 minute call.