Founding Member of Technical Staff Zurich ML Systems

Fainite AG; Zürich; On-site; CHF 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Fainite AG in Zurich is seeking a Founding Member of Technical Staff to own problems end-to-end—from research ideas to reliable model deployment at scale. This senior role shapes the technical direction and spans ML systems, architecture, data, training infrastructure, and deployment.

You will lead model development, research evaluation, distributed training, data pipelines, and productionization, influencing the product from day one.

Qualifications

• Senior candidate with substantial track record shipping real ML systems.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and reliability mindset.
• Proficient in Python and PyTorch with distributed training experience.

Responsibilities

• Model development for physics-based tasks (3D mechanics, CFD).
• Research: survey literature and prototype ideas for production.
• Distributed training: optimize multi-node training and data pipelines.

Skills

Senior leadership

Raw talent

Software engineering

ML experience

Research ability

Domain knowledge

Job description

Everything humans build is driven by simulation: the shape of a turbine blade, the structureof a chassis, the cooling path through a battery pack. And simulation is still painfully slow:millions of engineers wait hours or days for a single run, forcing them to explore just a fewdesigns when the best one may lie in the thousands they never reach. Replacing simulation withdirect prediction is one of the great unsolved problems in AI.

Our answer is a foundation model for hardware engineering: a large-scale physics AI model thatturns simulation into inference, collapsing hours into seconds. One model across the full lifecycle ofa physical product, from design through engineering to manufacturing. The ambition is simple:become the AI infrastructure underneath how the world builds hardware.

We're a tight-knit team in Zurich, with engineers from Caltech, Google, CERN, and ETH workingalongside a professor from Cambridge. Ideas go from whiteboard to training run in a day, andeveryone touches everything.

The role

We are hiring a Founding Member of Technical Staff to own problems end to end: From a researchidea, to training a model reliably at scale, to a system we can deploy and trust. This is asenior role with substantial scope over our technical direction. You willwork across the full stack of an ML system, architecture, data, training infrastructure,deployment; your decisions will drive the evolution of the product from day one.

Your mission

• Model development: Design and train models for 3D solid mechanics andfluid dynamics, and run the experiments that move the models forward.
• Research: Track the literature, prototype quickly and judge which ideasare worth taking from paper to production.
• Distributed training: Build and optimize distributed training in PyTorch,multi-node DDP, high-throughput data loading, reproducible large-scale runs and debug itwhen it breaks.
• Data infrastructure: Own the pipeline from raw simulation output toefficient, streamed training data at scale.
• Productionization: Turn models into reliable, observable services thatengineers outside the team can depend on.

Your profile

• Seniority: You have spent several years building ML systems in a seriousenvironment, big tech, a leading research institution, or a comparably demanding setting.This is not an entry-level role; we are looking for people with a substantial track recordof shipping real systems.
• Raw talent: We care a great deal about how you think. Evidence ofexceptional talent, strong performance in math or computer science, competitiveprogramming, research with real results, or anything else that demonstrates it, isgenuinely valuable to us.
• Engineering: Strong software engineering fundamentals and a history ofbuilding and shipping production ML systems. You write code that a team can build on, andyou care about correctness and reliability.
• ML experience: Proficiency in Python and PyTorch, and hands-on experiencetraining models at scale, including the practical realities of distributed training,throughput and large-scale data pipelines.
• Research ability: You can read a paper, assess whether it is worthimplementing and design a clean experiment to test it.
• Optional Domain knowledge: Familiaritywith physics, numerical methods, or scientific computing, FEM, CFD, PDEs, gives you a headstart and we weight it heavily. But the modelling and systems challenges are the core ofthe job and we have strong engineers who learned the physics here.

How we work

We take on hard technical problems and hold ourselves to a high bar. The team iscommitted, ownership is real, and the pace is demanding. We are direct about thisbecause it is central to how we operate.

We are looking for people with a demonstrated history of exceptional drive: Pushing a hardproblem to a result others thought was out of reach. In your application, point to concreteevidence of that from your own past work.

What we offer

• The technical challenge: Building foundation models for physics is an unsolvedproblem with real industrial impact, not a thin wrapper around someone else's model.
• Real ownership: Founding role with meaningful equity, significantinfluence over the technical direction, and a real say in where the company goes.
• The team: Highly focused group of engineers and researchers from ETH, Caltech,Cambridge and Google who back each other.
• Compensation: Competitive salary and significant equity, because we hirepeople who could work anywhere and we want that to be an easy part of the decision.