Founding ML Researcher
San Francisco, CA ยท On-site ยท Full-time Compensation: $200,000โ$300,000 + 0.1%โ1% equity
About the Company
A seed-stage AI company converting complex, unstructured documents into clean, LLM-ready structured data. Production-grade APIs ingest, parse, structure, and split documents across formats (PDF, PPT, Excel) into Markdown and JSON that AI agents and LLMs can work with reliably โ preserving document structure and hierarchy while capturing the domain-specific context critical for high-stakes workflows in finance, legal, and healthcare. Founded 2024 ยท 1โ10 people ยท Industry: AI Tools / Document AI
The Role
Founding ML Researcher shaping the company's ML research direction and translating cutting-edge research into production-ready document-AI models. Research-heavy but product-oriented โ you'll be comfortable moving between theory, experimentation, and real-world deployment, with full ownership from idea to production.
What you'll be doing
- Own the end-to-end ML lifecycle: research experimentation training evaluation production deployment
- Work with the engineering team to transition research into deployed, scalable systems
- Drive best practices for data, experimentation, evaluation, and model iteration
- Work directly with the founders to shape product direction and engineering strategy
Tech stack: VLM-based document understanding, layout models, document parsing of unstructured data, and production model serving / inference optimization.
Requirements
- Training and deploying state-of-the-art models for parsing and understanding unstructured data
- Experimenting with novel techniques to improve layout models and VLM-based document understanding
- Building data pipelines, evaluating model performance, and integrating models into production systems
Green Flags
- Experience at top research labs like DeepMind, OpenAI
- Strong publication record in computer vision/ML
- Hands-on implementation and production experience
Red Flags
- Candidates whose recent focus has been management, rather than individual contributor work
- No hands-on experience training AI models
Why Join
- Define the technical archetype for a small, talent-dense founding team
- Full ownership of the ML lifecycle, from research through production
- Direct collaboration with the founders on product and ML strategy
- Ship models used in high-stakes finance, legal, and healthcare workflows
- Competitive comp + equity, full health insurance, DoorDash/Uber credits, company laptop
Details
Location: San Francisco, CA
Work policy: On-site
Compensation: $200,000โ$300,000 + 0.1%โ1% equity
Experience: Any (new PhD grads are acceptable)
Visa sponsorship: H-1B, O-1, OPT
Employment type: Full-time