Founding ML Researcher (US)

We are looking for a Founding AI Engineer with 0-3 years of experience to build and ship the AI core of an industrial smart-glasses product powered by agentic vision-language models. You'll join Alcor Labs, a YC-style startup deploying wearable AI co-pilots to data centers, energy grids, and aerospace, as a foundational member of the engineering team. This is a rare opportunity to own the full multimodal AI stack from day one: production VLM pipelines, eval frameworks, edge inference, and real-time voice-video AI running on actual hardware in the field. You should be a scrappy, high-ownership builder who has shipped agentic or multimodal systems to real users, not just demos. If you're excited about computer vision, wearables, and solving hard applied AI problems in legacy industries, this role is for you.

What will you be doing?

• Ship a production agentic-VLM pipeline on smart glasses: multi-step, tool-using visual-reasoning loops running against real industrial workflows (SOPs, inspections)

• Build and own the eval + data flywheel: eval harnesses, failure-mode capture, and customer-data → fine-tune loops that measurably improve model quality each release

• Ship field connectivity adaptation and edge inference: model orchestration, runtime optimization, and graceful fallback across varying connectivity and latency budgets

• Build real-time voice-video AI interfaces for the glasses: video-heavy, conversational speech, and proactive alert modes adapted to different end-user profiles

• Drive multimodal model training including open-source model fine-tuning (SFT, RLHF, quantization) for on-premise enterprise deployments