Founding ML Researcher

San Francisco, CA

• On-site
• Full-time Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 0.1%–1% 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 — preserving document structure and hierarchy while capturing the domain-specific context critical for high-stakes workflows in finance, legal, and healthcare. Founded 2024

• 1–10 people
• 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 — 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: $200,000–$300,000 + 0.1%–1% equity

Experience: Any (new PhD grads are acceptable)

Visa sponsorship: H-1B, O-1, OPT

Employment type: Full-time