Location
San Francisco, USA
Work Type
On-site
Our client is a research lab in San Francisco, currently two people, and they're hiring engineer number one.
What they've built
Foundation models for emotional and behavioral annotation. Pose, facial expression, and intent inference from video in under 100ms, state of the art on affective benchmarks. Applications are visual security, egocentric data labeling for robotics, and film. It's an industry nobody had touched with modern scaling laws, and they did it first.
What you'd own
The entire inference and deployment stack, end to end. Real on-prem work alongside cloud, meaning NPUs on cameras and local server racks, because a lot of the client base is government. Compliance is part of the build: SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, CCPA, and FedRAMP as the DoD grants land. There's no platform team yet. You'd define it.
The package
Founding equity at a $10M valuation, sized like a co-founder stake rather than a standard hire's, plus a base salary. They're pre-seed with a raise in motion, and cash moves up meaningfully once it closes. The title starts at engineer, and the path to CTO is explicit if it goes well.
Both founders are technical and young, and they're clear that they want a peer, not a report. The bar they described: someone who sees a problem, picks a direction, and comes back with a result.
Location
San Francisco, USA
Work Type
On-site
Our client is a research lab in San Francisco, currently two people, and they're hiring engineer number one.
What they've built
Foundation models for emotional and behavioral annotation. Pose, facial expression, and intent inference from video in under 100ms, state of the art on affective benchmarks. Applications are visual security, egocentric data labeling for robotics, and film. It's an industry nobody had touched with modern scaling laws, and they did it first.
What you'd own
The entire inference and deployment stack, end to end. Real on-prem work alongside cloud, meaning NPUs on cameras and local server racks, because a lot of the client base is government. Compliance is part of the build: SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, CCPA, and FedRAMP as the DoD grants land. There's no platform team yet. You'd define it.
The package
Founding equity at a $10M valuation, sized like a co-founder stake rather than a standard hire's, plus a base salary. They're pre-seed with a raise in motion, and cash moves up meaningfully once it closes. The title starts at engineer, and the path to CTO is explicit if it goes well.
Both founders are technical and young, and they're clear that they want a peer, not a report. The bar they described: someone who sees a problem, picks a direction, and comes back with a result.