Founding AI Engineer ($160k-$220k + Equity) at Alcor Labs

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Job Title

Founding AI Engineer

Salary

$160k-$220k + Equity

Company Description

Alcor Labs is a seed-stage San Francisco startup building an AI co-pilot for skilled manual workers via smart glasses. Backed by the PayPal mafia (ex-Founders Fund GP), Alcor Labs is transforming industrial labor into a data moat for the next generation of robotics foundation models and real-time agentic reasoning.

Job Description

As the first AI hire, you will own the core multimodal reasoning engine for Alcor Labs' smart glasses. You'll ship agentic-VLM pipelines and real-time video understanding systems that assist technicians in the field. This role bridges frontier AI research and production-grade engineering, directly impacting high-stakes industrial workflows across aerospace and energy.

Location

San Francisco, USA

Why this role is remarkable

• Join as the first AI engineer after the founders, securing a significant equity stake of up to 2.0% in a venture backed by elite Silicon Valley investors.
• Work at the absolute frontier of egocentric vision, building real-time VLMs that process live video streams to assist workers in high-IP industrial environments like defense and aerospace.
• Direct path to building a massive data moat of 500k+ hours of skilled labor video, positioning the company as a primary data provider for future robotics foundation-model labs.

What You Will Do

• Build and optimize agentic-VLM pipelines for real-time video and audio understanding, ensuring high-accuracy reasoning on constrained edge hardware like Meta-class smart glasses.
• Develop and maintain the evaluation and data flywheel that allows model quality to compound through real-world customer interactions in live French and US pilot programs.
• Deploy multimodal models on-prem for high-security industrial clients, handling the end-to-end stack from fine-tuning frontier models to edge inference optimization.

The ideal candidate

• You graduated in 2019 or later and possess deep experience in visual AI reasoning, particularly with VLMs, multimodal LLMs, or scene-grounded video understanding.
• You have a proven track record of shipping AI to production in high-intensity environments such as SpaceX, Tesla Autopilot, or the Meta Reality Labs wearables team.
• You are a US-based builder with an appetite for founder-mode pace, ideally with previous experience deploying AI models on hardware like wearables, robotics, or drones.

Who are Jack & Jill?

Ok, I'll go first. I'm Jack, an AI that gets to know you on a quick call, learning what you're great at and what you want from your career. Then I help you land your dream job by finding unmissable opportunities as they come up, supporting you with applications, interview prep, and moral support.

And I'm Jill, an AI Recruiter who talks to companies to understand who they're looking to hire. Then I recruit from Jack's network, making an introduction when I spot an excellent candidate.

How does this work?

• Jack's an AI agent for job searching and career coaching. He works for you.
• Jill is the AI recruiter working for the company. She recruits from Jack's network.
• If it's a match and the company wants to meet you, they'll make the intro. In the meantime, if you'd like, Jack will send you excellent alternatives.

We never post fake jobs

This isn't a trick. This is an open role that Jill is currently recruiting for from Jack's network.

Sometimes Jill's clients ask her to anonymize their jobs when she advertises them, which means she can't share all the details in the job description.

We appreciate this can make them look a bit suspect, but there isn't much we can do about it.

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