Job Description
Founding Machine Learning Engineer
Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite 5 days/week)
Compensation: $200,000 - $375,000 base salary + equity
Visa Sponsorship: Available for qualified candidates
About the Opportunity
Our client is an early-stage, venture-backed consumer AI startup building a category-defining product at the intersection of artificial intelligence, personalization, and human connection. Backed by leading investors and experiencing strong early traction, the company is assembling a small, high-caliber team to build intelligent systems that deeply understand users and create highly personalized experiences.
This is an opportunity to join as one of the earliest machine learning hires and play a foundational role in shaping the company's core technology and future direction.
The Role
We are seeking a Founding Machine Learning Engineer to design, build, and scale the intelligent systems that power the company's recommendation, personalization, and AI-driven user experiences.
You will work directly with founders and senior technical leadership to build production-grade machine learning systems that leverage multimodal data, large language models, and advanced recommendation techniques. This role offers significant ownership, influence, and the ability to shape both technical architecture and product outcomes from the ground up.
What You'll Do
- Design, train, deploy, and optimize machine learning models for recommendation and personalization systems
- Build intelligent matching and ranking systems that improve user outcomes and engagement
- Develop evaluation frameworks and feedback loops to continuously improve model performance
- Apply and fine-tune large language models to power conversational and agentic AI experiences
- Work with structured and unstructured data, including text, images, and user-generated content
- Build scalable data pipelines and production ML infrastructure
- Own the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle, from experimentation and model development through deployment, monitoring, and iteration
- Collaborate closely with product, engineering, and leadership teams to translate business goals into machine learning solutions
Required Qualifications
- 4+ years of experience building and deploying machine learning models in production environments
- Strong experience with recommendation systems, personalization engines, ranking systems, matching algorithms, or marketplace relevance models
- Hands-on expertise with PyTorch and/or TensorFlow
- Experience applying large language models to real-world products
- Strong Python programming skills
- Experience deploying and monitoring machine learning systems in production
- Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and modern ML infrastructure
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building recommendation or personalization systems for consumer products
- Background in marketplaces, consumer applications, social platforms, travel, transportation, dating, food delivery, or similar recommendation-heavy environments
- Experience working in early-stage startups or as a founding/early machine learning hire
- Exposure to agentic AI systems, reinforcement learning, preference learning, or conversational AI
- Experience working with multimodal datasets and machine learning pipelines
- Research background, publications, or advanced academic work in machine learning, artificial intelligence, or related fields
What We're Looking For
Successful candidates will have a track record of building intelligent systems that help determine what users should see, who they should connect with, or how products should personalize experiences. We are particularly interested in engineers who enjoy solving complex recommendation, ranking, matching, and personalization challenges while operating in a fast-moving startup environment.
This role is ideal for someone who wants significant ownership, enjoys building from zero to one, and is excited by the opportunity to create technology that impacts millions of users.
Why Join?
- Founding-level opportunity with meaningful ownership and influence
- Competitive compensation and equity package
- Work alongside exceptional founders and technical leaders
- Build cutting-edge AI products at the intersection of machine learning, personalization, and human-centered technology
- Help define the future of a rapidly growing consumer AI company
Interested candidates are encouraged to apply and share details of recommendation systems, personalization engines, ranking models, or consumer AI products they have built and deployed.