Senior AI Engineer - San Francisco (Onsite) - $180K - $250K
I'm working with a fast-moving start-up in San Francisco that's just entering a high-growth phase. They're looking for a Senior AI Engineer to join the early technical team - someone who can help lay the foundation for their AI systems while the company scales This is an on-site role (6 days/week), ideal for someone who thrives in fast-paced environments and wants to ship real products powered by cutting-edge ML.
You'll work closely with product, design, and engineering to take ideas from prototype to production. This role offers significant ownership, technical depth, and the opportunity to shape both the stack and the user experience.
What you'll be doing:
- Designing and building ML systems that directly power user-facing features
- Training and fine-tuning deep learning models in areas like computer vision, NLP, generative models, and multi-modal AI
- Owning the full lifecycle of ML models - from research and experimentation to deployment, monitoring, and iteration
- Building the internal infrastructure to support scalable model training, evaluation, and delivery
- Collaborating cross-functionally to ship polished, AI-driven features
- Contributing to decisions across the stack, from architecture to deployment
What they're looking for:
- Strong experience with Python and deep learning frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX
- Familiarity with libraries and tooling such as Transformers (Hugging Face), TorchVision, OpenCV, scikit-learn, and Weights & Biases (or similar for experiment tracking)
- Skilled in developing custom model architectures and optimizing for performance and inference at scale
- Experience building and scaling ML pipelines in a cloud environment (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Familiar with MLOps/DevOps practices - CI/CD, monitoring, versioning, containerization
- Previous experience in a high-velocity start-up or technical founding team
- Comfortable working on-site 6 days/week - the team believes in speed, collaboration, and tight feedback loops
Bonus experience:
- Experience with vision-language models, transformers, or generative AI
- Applied research or publication background
- Contributions to open source or internal ML tooling
- Track record of building ML products end-to-end - not just the models, but real features powered by them