Founding AI Engineer

Location: On Site in San Francisco, California, United States

Employment type: Full-time

Salary: $200,000 - $300,000 per year

MissionHires is hiring a Founding AI Engineer to own end-to-end ML research and productionization for cutting-edge Computer Vision and Document AI. You’ll design and deploy state-of-the-art models for parsing unstructured enterprise data, build scalable data/evaluation pipelines, lead architectural improvements (including VLMs and 3B–7B models), and partner directly with the founders on product and technical strategy. This is an in-person role in San Francisco with high ownership, fast iteration, and meaningful equity.

• Own the full ML research lifecycle: problem formulation, experimentation, model training, evaluation, optimization, and deployment
• Design and improve state-of-the-art Computer Vision and Document AI models for unstructured enterprise data
• Lead architectural improvements to vision models and VLM-based document understanding systems
• Build scalable data pipelines and evaluation frameworks to continuously measure and improve performance
• Transition research prototypes into reliable, production-grade systems in collaboration with engineering
• Establish best practices for experimentation, reproducibility, benchmarking, and iteration
• Work directly with founders to shape product direction and long-term technical strategy
• Contribute to research credibility through publications, benchmarks, or open-source contributions when appropriate

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Vision, Document AI, or closely related field (top-tier institution preferred)

• Strong academic research background; multiple relevant publications preferred

• Up to 6 years post–Master’s/PhD experience with end-to-end ML research ownership

• Experience in 0-to-1 startup environments with high ambiguity and rapid iteration

• Background at a leading research lab (e.g., DeepMind, FAIR, Microsoft Research, OpenAI, Anthropic) strongly preferred

• Deep expertise in Computer Vision, Document AI, multimodal learning, or related domains

• Proven experience building or significantly improving model architectures (beyond fine-tuning)

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• Experience with smaller foundation models (approximately 3B–7B parameters)

• Strong Python proficiency and familiarity with modern ML frameworks

• Experience training and deploying models for parsing and understanding unstructured data

• Hands-on experience building evaluation pipelines and integrating models into production systems

• Comfort moving between theory, experimentation, and production deployment

• Strong product intuition with ability to prioritize research for business impact

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• High ownership mindset and bias toward action

• Willingness to work in person and commit to an early-stage company’s intensity

   

• Competitive base salary: $200K–$300K

• Meaningful equity ownership: 0.1%–1%

• Visa sponsorship available for exceptional candidates (including new H1B applications).

• Opportunity to shape the technical foundation of a high-growth AI company.