Founding AI/ML Engineer

About the Role:

Join us as we build VLM Run – the enterprise infrastructure layer for visual intelligence. Our mission is to give developers a unified way to fine-tune, specialize, and run Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that turn images, PDFs, screenshots, and video into reliable, schema-true structured data for production insights and automation – built for scale, security, and SLAs.

We’re looking for exceptional an exceptional Founding AI/ML Engineer to help us build and scale the infrastructure layer for visual intelligence. You’ll do well here if you bring strong technical craft, high ownership, and strength in one or more of these areas:

• Platform & Infra: Own and optimize the VLM inference stack (see Orion) end-to-end – from GPU serving and latency/cost to scalable backend systems and reliability.
• Developer Experience: Design clean, ergonomic APIs for multimodal apps – tool/function calling, structured outputs, and workflows developers actually want to build.
• High Agency Velocity: We move fast on hard problems. You’ll take ideas from 0→1, set the bar for quality, and help define what “production-grade visual intelligence” looks like.

🎓 Required Expertise (BS & 4 YoE)

• LLM Experience: Integrated or built applications with LLMs (OpenAI, HuggingFace, Ollama, vLLM), with an understanding of prompt engineering, function calling, and structured outputs.
• Backend Engineering: Python, FastAPI, async API design, schema validation, caching, and performance optimization.
• Infra & DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability (logging, metrics, tracing), GCP or AWS.
• Datastores & Systems: Postgres, MongoDB, Redis; experience with scalable, reliable data pipelines.
• Developer Experience: Strong testing discipline (TDD), clean code, GitHub workflows (PRs, reviews, CI), and internal tooling mindset.
• [BONUS] SaaS Experience: Shipped full-stack dev platforms or SaaS products – from landing pages to auth, billing, telemetry, and infra. Email us with a one-liner if you've done this.

🗒️ Other Details

• Competitive compensation and benefits: We pay market rate for seed-stage startups equity options, offer great healthcare and 401K.
• In-person: At least 3-4 days a week in Santa Clara, CA (we’re right by 101, next to AMD’s HQ offices).

Salary: 150K-200K

Additional Job Application Terms

This job is part of LinkedIn’s Full-Service Hiring beta program. Eligibility is limited to candidates located in and performing services in the United States, excluding those based in Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, South Carolina, or West Virginia.

We’re committed to making our hiring process as smooth and timely as possible, and we understand that waiting to hear back can add to the anticipation. If you’re a potential fit, our team will reach out within two weeks to progress you to the next stage. If you don’t hear from us in that time, we encourage you to explore other opportunities with our team in the future, and we wish you the very best in your job search.