Artificial Intelligence Researcher — San Francisco Bay Area

Applied AI Researcher (Generative AI & Computer Vision)

San Francisco, CA (Hybrid, 3-4 days per week)

Base Salary: $300,000 - $500,000 Equity Available - Early-stage AI Company Working with Leading Frontier Model Labs

The Opportunity

We're partnering with a rapidly growing AI company operating at the intersection of generative AI, computer vision, and large-scale data creation.

The business works with hundreds of thousands of creators globally and supplies high-quality training data to some of the world's most advanced AI organizations. Having built exceptional data collection capabilities, they're now looking for an Applied AI Researcher who can bridge the gap between cutting-edge model research and the data required to improve next-generation AI systems.

This is a unique opportunity for someone who has worked directly on generative models and wants to influence how future foundation models are trained, evaluated, and improved.

What You'll Do

• Analyse state-of-the-art image and video generation models to identify performance gaps and limitations.

• Review research papers, technical reports, model releases, and emerging architectures across the generative AI landscape.

• Design datasets, schemas, metadata structures, and collection strategies that directly address model weaknesses.

• Partner with Product teams to translate research insights into scalable data initiatives.

• Collaborate with AI researchers and technical stakeholders across leading AI organizations.

• Engage with commercial and customer-facing teams to understand emerging market requirements.

• Drive the definition and delivery of high-impact datasets used to improve frontier AI systems.

What We're Looking For

• PhD in Computer Science, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or a related field preferred.

• 2+ years of experience in applied AI research, research engineering, or generative AI.

• Hands-on experience building, training, evaluating, or improving generative models.

• Strong understanding of how training data influences model performance and behaviour.

• Experience with image generation, computer vision, diffusion models, multimodal AI, or video generation systems.

• Ability to identify model failure modes and define data-driven solutions.

• Comfortable reading academic research and translating findings into practical outcomes.

• Excellent communication skills and ability to work cross-functionally with research, product, and commercial teams.

Ideal Backgrounds

We're particularly interested in candidates who have worked on generative image or video systems within:

• Frontier AI labs

• Leading computer vision research teams

• Generative AI startups

• Applied research groups focused on multimodal AI

• Research engineering teams building foundation models

Researchers from both industry and academia will be considered, provided they have a strong applied mindset and a track record of translating research into real-world impact.

Why Join?

• Influence the future development of state-of-the-art AI models.

• Work on some of the industry's most challenging data and model quality problems.

• Collaborate directly with leading AI researchers and frontier model teams.

• Significant compensation package with meaningful equity participation.

• Opportunity to shape a critical function within a high-growth AI organization.

If you're passionate about generative AI, computer vision, and understanding how data can unlock the next breakthrough in model performance, we'd love to hear from you.