Technical Lead, Machine Learning (Founding Team)

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

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

Lead the design, development, and deployment of production-grade machine learning systems.
Build and maintain scalable data pipelines, training workflows, evaluation frameworks, inference systems, and deployment infrastructure.
Fine-tune and optimize large language models using techniques such as LoRA, QLoRA, SFT, DPO, and model distillation.
Design high-performance inference systems that balance latency, throughput, cost, and reliability.
Develop evaluation frameworks that measure model quality, robustness, safety, and real-world performance.
Optimize production deployments through GPU optimization, memory efficiency, and scalable infrastructure.
Partner closely with research, backend, mobile, and application engineering teams to bring AI capabilities into production.
Provide hands-on technical leadership, helping establish engineering best practices while delivering high-impact machine learning solutions.

What we're looking for

Experience building and deploying production machine learning systems used by real customers.
Strong experience with modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and/or JAX.
Experience training, fine-tuning, or deploying large language models in production.
Strong software engineering skills with the ability to build reliable, maintainable systems.
Experience designing scalable training, inference, and evaluation pipelines.
Strong understanding of distributed systems, GPU infrastructure, and production AI workloads.
Excellent collaboration and communication skills with the ability to provide technical leadership across teams.
A builder's mindset with a strong sense of ownership and a passion for solving complex technical challenges.

Tech Stack

Python
PyTorch / JAX
GPU-based training and inference systems
Modern foundation models and LLM technologies

Why this role?

Founding technical leadership opportunity at a well-funded AI startup.
Help build a consumer AI product from zero to scale.
Play a key role in translating cutting-edge AI research into reliable production systems.
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 machine learning architecture, engineering practices, and technical direction from day one.