Principal Machine Learning Engineer (Founding Team)

Type of employment: Permanent, Full-time
Work model: Fully remote (United States or Canada)
Ideal experience: Principal Machine Learning Engineering, AI Infrastructure, Foundation Models

Why join this opportunity?

Our client is an early-stage, well-funded AI startup building a next-generation consumer AI platform designed to help people automate everyday tasks, workflows, and errands through intelligent, real-world task execution.

This is a rare opportunity to join as a founding engineer and help shape both the product and the machine learning foundation from the very beginning. You'll work alongside an experienced leadership team in a fast-paced, high-trust environment where ownership, curiosity, and execution are highly valued.

What you'll do

Architect and build large-scale machine learning systems spanning data, training, evaluation, inference, and deployment.
Design scalable, reproducible training pipelines optimized for modern GPU infrastructure.
Build high-performance inference systems that balance latency, throughput, reliability, and cost.
Design and maintain data pipelines supporting both synthetic and real-world training data.
Develop evaluation frameworks that measure model quality, robustness, safety, and real-world performance.
Optimize production deployments through GPU optimization, memory efficiency, quantization, and system scalability.
Partner closely with research, backend, mobile, and application engineering teams to bring AI capabilities into production.
Make pragmatic technical decisions and continuously improve systems based on production learnings.

What we're looking for

Strong background in deep learning and transformer-based architectures.
Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or deploying large-scale machine learning models in production.
Expertise with modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and/or JAX.
Experience with distributed training or inference frameworks such as DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron, ZeRO, or Ray.
Strong software engineering skills and the ability to build reliable, maintainable production systems.
Experience optimizing GPU workloads, including memory management, mixed precision, and inference performance.
Experience working on complex machine learning systems from concept through production.
A builder's mindset with a strong sense of ownership and a passion for solving difficult technical problems.

Nice to have

Experience with inference frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or FasterTransformer.
Experience with RLHF techniques such as PPO, DPO, or ORPO.
Experience developing multimodal or diffusion models.
Contributions to open-source machine learning or systems projects.
Experience with large-scale data processing technologies such as Apache Arrow, Spark, or Ray.
Background in scientific computing, compiler technologies, or GPU programming.

Why this role?

Founding engineer opportunity at a well-funded AI startup.
Help build a consumer AI product from zero to scale.
Play a key role in defining the company's machine learning architecture and technical direction.
Fully remote across the United States and Canada.
Small, high-calibre engineering team with direct access to leadership.
High-trust, flexible work environment.
Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
401(k) with employer match (U.S.).
Visa sponsorship available where applicable.
Opportunity to influence the company's AI systems, engineering standards, and long-term technical strategy from day one.