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.