Machine Learning Engineer / Researcher

This onsite senior ML and research role sits at the intersection of advanced research and practical engineering for an AI powered CAD product. You will mentor new hires and have the opportunity to grow into a Staff or Principal IC or an early engineering leader within a small, accomplished founding team. The position offers a competitive compensation package and meaningful equity, plus health coverage, a collaborative culture, and a direct impact on how hardware is designed and manufactured.

Benefits

• Salary: USD 110,000 – 175,000 per year
• Meaningful equity tied to company milestones
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Catered team lunch at the San Mateo office
• Unlimited or flexible time off
• High ownership in a small, senior founding team
• Growth opportunities to mentor new hires and advance toward Staff or Principal IC

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and refine custom deep learning models that understand CAD workflows and generate high quality next-step suggestions
• Build and maintain robust Python training and evaluation pipelines, including data preprocessing, experimentation, and offline/online metrics
• Architect model serving and backend components to ensure fast, reliable features that integrate with CAD environments
• Collaborate directly with the founder and early customers (mechanical and hardware engineers) to translate real-world workflows into ML formulations
• Own the full lifecycle of ML features from research and prototyping through productionization, deployment, and monitoring
• Work with the broader engineering team on core product and infrastructure efforts including backend, APIs, data models, and performance
• Establish and promote best practices for experimentation, logging, and model comparison
• Stay current with relevant ML research (sequence models, geometric deep learning, representation learning) and apply findings pragmatically

Requirements

• 4+ years of hands-on ML experience, or an equivalent research-based Master's or PhD
• Proven track record of training and improving deep models, not solely calling hosted APIs
• Expertise with PyTorch (preferred), TensorFlow, or JAX; comfortable implementing and modifying custom architectures, loss functions, and training loops
• Strong production-ready Python skills with clean code, tests, documentation, and thoughtful abstractions
• End-to-end ownership experience including data handling, deployment, training pipelines, hyperparameter tuning, and shipping models into real products
• Ability to work closely with founders and translate open-ended product requirements into concrete ML formulations
• Onsite in San Mateo or hybrid work arrangement; able to commute
• US work authorization required; no sponsorship available

Technologies

• Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX
• FastAPI, Flask, Django
• AWS, GCP

Logistics

• Onsite work preferred in San Mateo; Bay Area candidates willing to commute will be considered
• US work authorization required; no visa sponsorship or relocation assistance available