Founding AI Engineer ($160k-$220k + Equity) at Seed-stage SF startup backed by Paypal Mafia

This is a job that Jill, our AI Recruiter, is recruiting for on behalf of one of our customers.

She will pick the best candidates from Jack's network.

The next step is to speak to Jack.

Job Title

Founding AI Engineer

Salary

$160k-$220k + Equity

Company Description

Seed-stage San Francisco startup building AI co-pilots for industrial workers, backed by the Paypal Mafia and a former Founders Fund GP.

Job Description

As the first AI hire, you will own the core multimodal reasoning engine powering smart glasses for skilled manual labor. You will build and ship real-time VLM pipelines, optimizing edge inference and vision-language models for technician workflows in the field. This role bridges frontier AI research and production-ready hardware deployment.

Location

San Francisco, USA

Why this role is remarkable

• Work at the frontier of egocentric video, building a massive data moat of 500k+ hours of industrial labor to train future robotics foundation models.
• Direct backing from elite Silicon Valley investors (ex-Founders Fund GP) with live enterprise pilots already active in the US and Europe.
• Rare opportunity to define the AI stack for the next generation of wearable hardware, moving from procedure generation to real-time agentic assistance.

What You Will Do

• Design and deploy agentic-VLM pipelines that process real-time video and audio streams from smart glasses to assist workers.
• Optimize multimodal models for edge inference and on-premise deployment to support high-IP industrial environments and low-latency reasoning.
• Build the evaluation and data flywheel required to continuously improve model quality based on real-world technician interactions and visual data.

The ideal candidate

• Proven track record of shipping production-level visual AI reasoning systems, specifically multimodal LLMs or video-understanding models used in real-world settings.
• Experience in high-intensity engineering environments such as SpaceX, Tesla Autopilot, or frontier AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta Reality Labs.
• Strong technical pedigree with an engineering degree from a top-tier institution (e.g., Stanford, MIT, CMU) completed within the last 7 years.

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.

Give Jack a spin! You could land this role. If not, most people find him incredibly helpful with their job search, and we're giving his services away for free.