Research Engineer (VLM / Multimodal AI)

Location: Mountain View, California, United States

Salary: $200,000–$400,000 per year

Company

Venture-backed AI and robotics startup building an AI-powered observability platform for critical infrastructure, including data centers, solar farms, wind farms, and oil refineries. The technology is deployed with customers and has received FAA approval for autonomous drone operations.

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 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, including retrieval, memory, and decision-making systems.
• Collaborate with robotics and autonomy engineers to connect perception, reasoning, and execution while shaping the architecture of the AI platform.

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 LLMs, 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.
• Ability to thrive in an autonomous, fast-moving startup environment.

Nice to have

• Exposure to computer vision, perception, robotics, autonomy, or embodied AI.

Culture & Benefits

• Autonomous work in a fast-moving startup environment.
• Collaboration with robotics and autonomy engineers.
• Opportunity to work on multimodal AI, agentic systems, robotics, and real-world deployment.