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Applied Research Engineer
Applied Research EngineerConfidential • San Mateo, CA, United States
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Applied Research Engineer

Applied Research Engineer

Confidential • San Mateo, CA, United States
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  • [job_card.full_time]
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About the Company (Confidential)

Our client is a cutting-edge AI research company specializing exclusively in video data —one of the fastest-growing and most technically demanding domains in machine learning. With just 12 team members , the company has already :

  • Partnered with leading AI labs ,
  • Achieved multi-million dollar revenue last quarter , and
  • Recently raised a Series A from top-tier investors , including Matrix Partners, Swift Ventures, Y Combinator, and AI Grant .

They are solving one of the biggest bottlenecks in AI today : creating high-quality, scalable training datasets for video modeling . Their work spans exabyte-scale infrastructure, novel video understanding techniques, and multi-modal data pipelines across video, audio, and text.

This is a rare opportunity to join an elite, deeply technical, and extremely high-leverage team at the frontier of AI research.

The Opportunity

As an Applied Research Engineer , you will build the high-performance infrastructure, pipelines, and research-driven components that push forward the state of video understanding at internet scale. This is an in-person role at the San Francisco HQ, working closely with founders and senior researchers.

You’ll operate end-to-end across ambiguous, open-ended research problems—designing clever pre / post-processing systems, optimizing inference, parallelizing large-scale workloads, and contributing to the core technical foundation of next-generation video modeling.

This is a high-ownership role ideal for someone who thrives in low-structure environments, loves working directly with models and APIs, and enjoys extracting every ounce of performance through deep problem-solving.

What You’ll Do

  • Build and optimize video, audio, and text processing pipelines at massive scale.
  • Work directly with models, APIs, and custom systems to push performance boundaries.
  • Develop high-precision video understanding building blocks for research and production.
  • Introduce techniques for parallelism, pipelining, inference optimization , and clever pre / post-processing.
  • Collaborate with customers and external teams to translate real-world needs into scalable solutions.
  • Contribute to the advancement of video modeling and dataset creation for top AI labs.
  • Operate across ambiguous research spaces—rapidly designing experiments, prototypes, and iterations.
  • Requirements

  • 2+ years of experience in computer vision or audio processing .
  • Strong Python engineering experience; hands-on with PyTorch or similar ML frameworks.
  • Excellent communication skills, especially with customers or external-facing partners.
  • Writes clean, maintainable, production-quality code.
  • Comfortable working with multi-modal models and APIs.
  • Deep interest in video, media technologies, and high-performance system design .
  • Motivated by building full end-to-end systems—not just model training.
  • Strong ability to break down problems from customer impact → technical building blocks.
  • In-person at the San Francisco HQ.
  • Bonus Points :

  • Active open-source contributor.
  • Experience as an early hire at a fast-moving startup.
  • GitHub portfolio or public technical projects.
  • Compensation & Benefits

  • Salary : $200,000–$250,000
  • Equity : 0.05%–0.4%
  • Employment : Full-time, in-person SF
  • Health insurance
  • Free lunch & dinner
  • Competitive total compensation package
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