Research Engineer (VLM / Multimodal AI)

Location: Mountain View, California, United States; onsite

Salary: $250,000 base plus equity

Company

Venture-backed AI and robotics startup building an AI-powered observability platform for critical infrastructure such as data centers, solar farms, wind farms, and oil refineries.

What you will do

• Build multimodal AI systems combining language models, vision models, and agentic reasoning.
• Develop vision-language models and multimodal agents that understand, analyze, and act on complex real-world data.
• Design natural-language interaction systems for fleets of autonomous robots.
• Build large-scale reasoning systems that analyze historical incidents, identify faults, and recommend corrective actions.
• Develop infrastructure for grounding language models in visual observations from drones and robotic platforms.
• Collaborate with robotics and autonomy engineers to connect perception, reasoning, and execution.

Requirements

• Experience with vision-language models, multimodal foundation models, or vision-language-action systems.
• Strong background in machine learning, deep learning, or applied AI research.
• Experience with large language models, agentic systems, retrieval, or multimodal reasoning.
• Strong software engineering skills and the ability to build production-grade AI systems.
• Experience taking research concepts into real-world applications.
• Exposure to computer vision, perception, robotics, autonomy, or embodied AI.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a fast-moving, highly autonomous startup environment.
• Collaborate with robotics and autonomy engineers on real-world AI deployment.
• Contribute to a platform already deployed with customers.
• Work on autonomous drone operations following recent FAA approval.