Founding ML Engineer, Computer Vision (Object Detection)

ABOUT THE ROLE

Join an early-stage marketplace company as its first machine learning engineer focused on computer vision. You will lead the design and production deployment of fine-grained item identification models, helping users identify products accurately and reliably from photos.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Design computer vision architecture for identifying items by brand, model, edition, and variant, adapting foundation vision models to a specific catalog.

- Define category-level accuracy standards and build calibrated confidence scoring so the product can communicate uncertainty appropriately.

- Create feedback loops that use model errors to guide labeling priorities in partnership with the labeling team.

- Set priorities between expanding category coverage and improving accuracy in existing categories.

- Own the model serving path from research through production, balancing latency, cost, and reliability at scale.

- Explain model capabilities, limitations, and technical tradeoffs to company stakeholders.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- At least 5 years of applied computer vision experience, including shipping systems to production at meaningful scale.

- Hands-on experience with fine-grained or instance-level recognition, distinguishing visually similar products where near-misses are not acceptable.

- Production experience fine-tuning and deploying vision transformers or CNNs using PyTorch or TensorFlow.

- Experience adapting foundation vision models to specific use cases, and designing evaluation frameworks that measure progress beyond loss metrics.

- Experience with calibrated prediction confidence and ownership of model serving decisions, including latency, cost, and reliability.

- Clear written and verbal communication skills, and comfort leading technical direction on an open-ended problem. Active learning, human-in-the-loop labeling, low-latency APIs, and early-stage startup experience are useful.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

Base salary: $200,000 to $260,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

LOCATION

Hybrid role based in New York, New York.