Founding ML Researcher

We’re hiring a Founding ML Researcher to join an early-stage AI company in San Francisco building document intelligence systems. This is a high-impact role within a small, talent-dense team, where early technical decisions will significantly influence the long-term direction and quality of the engineering organisation.

You’ll be expected to work autonomously, take full ownership of complex ML systems, and drive ideas from initial research through to production deployment.

 

What You’ll Do

• Shape the company’s ML research roadmap and translate research into production-grade document AI models

• Own the full ML lifecycle: research → experimentation → training → evaluation → deployment

• Partner closely with engineers to transition research into scalable, deployed systems

• Establish best practices around data quality, experimentation, evaluation, and model iteration

 

What We’re Looking For

This is a research-heavy but product-focused role. You should be comfortable moving fluidly between theory, hands-on experimentation, and real-world deployment.

You’ll ideally have experience in several of the following areas:

• Training and deploying state-of-the-art models for understanding unstructured or semi-structured data

• Experimenting with advanced techniques for layout-aware models and vision-language document understanding

• Building data pipelines, evaluating model performance, and integrating models into production environments

• Collaborating closely with leadership to influence product direction and technical strategy

 

Nice to Have

• PhD or equivalent research experience in computer vision, vision-language models, or related fields

• Publications at leading AI or ML conferences

• Experience with model serving, inference optimisation, or large-scale deployment

 

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $200k – $300k

• Equity: 0.1% – 1%

• Location: In-person, SF

• Visa: Sponsorship available

 

If you're interested, apply today or reach out to Adam@umatr.io