AI Research Engineer — Vision & VLMs for Real-World AI

Palona AI; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Stock options

Green card sponsorship for qualified U

Medical, dental, vision benefits

Job summary

Palona AI is building AI for the physical world, starting with restaurants. We seek an AI Research Engineer to advance visual intelligence for image/video understanding and multimodal reasoning in real restaurant environments.

You will own research questions, build datasets, train and evaluate models, and partner with product and engineering to deploy successful approaches into production. We encourage researchers from autonomous driving, robotics, and embodied AI to apply.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of research or applied development in computer vision or multimodal learning (or relevant grad research).
• Strong track record in CV or vision-language modeling via publications, projects, or industry work.
• Strong foundations in deep learning, visual representation learning, and experimental design.
• Hands-on experience training or adapting CV models and evaluating VLMs beyond API usage.
• Strong Python skills and PyTorch or equivalent DL frameworks.
• Experience building datasets, designing evaluations, and using ablations to understand improvements.
• Ability to turn research code into reproducible, tested systems for others to use.
• Ability to align modeling choices with product constraints like latency and privacy.

Responsibilities

• Develop CV and VLM approaches for scene understanding, object detection and tracking, activity recognition, and video event understanding.
• Adapt, fine-tune, and evaluate vision and vision-language models for grounding, temporal reasoning, and structured prediction.
• Design training strategies including supervised fine-tuning, representation learning, distillation, and domain adaptation.
• Build representative image/video datasets, annotation workflows, and evaluation sets capturing edge cases while protecting data.
• Create rigorous experiments and benchmarks measuring perception quality, robustness, latency, and costs across locations.
• Diagnose failures from occlusion, lighting, camera placement, rare events, and domain shift; improve data and models.
• Collaborate with infra and product engineers to deploy efficient inference pipelines with monitoring and rollback paths.
• Translate advances into practical product capabilities and communicate tradeoffs and evidence behind decisions.
• Raise standards through reproducible experiments, reviews, and documentation.

Skills

Python

Deep learning

Computer vision

Multimodal learning

Experiment design

Research

Education

PhD or related master in CV / ML / robotics

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

Palona AI is building AI for the physical world, starting with restaurants. We seek an AI Research Engineer to advance visual intelligence for image/video understanding and multimodal reasoning in real restaurant environments.

You will own research questions, build datasets, train and evaluate models, and partner with product and engineering to deploy successful approaches into production. We encourage researchers from autonomous driving, robotics, and embodied AI to apply.