Principal Machine Learning Engineer (Founding Team)

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.
Postuler / Apply