AI Research Engineer: Vision & VLMs (Stock Options)

Palona AI; Los Altos (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Stock options

Green card sponsorship

Medical insurance

Paid time off

Learning & development

Job summary

Palona AI in the United States seeks an AI Research Engineer with a strong CV and vision-language background to build visual intelligence for restaurant environments. You will develop models for scene understanding, detection, tracking, and multimodal reasoning, and collaborate with product and engineering to deploy production-ready systems.

Ideal candidates have 3+ years of CV or multimodal research, a PhD or research-focused masters, and hands-on PyTorch experience.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of research or applied development in computer vision or multimodal learning.
• Demonstrated research track record in computer vision or vision-language modeling (publications, projects, or industry deliverables).
• Strong foundations in deep learning, representation learning, and experimental design.
• Hands-on experience training/fine-tuning computer vision models and evaluating VLMs.

Responsibilities

• Develop CV and VLM approaches for scene understanding, object detection/tracking, activity recognition, and event understanding across video.
• Adapt and evaluate vision-language models for grounding, temporal reasoning, and structured predictions grounded in observable evidence.
• Design training and adaptation strategies including supervised fine-tuning, representation learning, distillation, and domain adaptation.
• Build image/video datasets, annotation workflows, and evaluation sets capturing edge cases while protecting data privacy.
• Create rigorous experiments/benchmarks measuring perception quality, robustness, latency, and cost across locations and conditions.
• Collaborate with infrastructure and product engineers to deploy efficient inference pipelines with monitoring and rollback paths.

Skills

Computer vision

Vision-language modeling

Python

PyTorch

Deep learning

Dataset building

Model evaluation

Software engineering

Cross-functional collaboration

Edge-case analysis

Education

PhD in Computer Vision / ML

Master's degree in Computer Vision / ML

Tools

OpenCV

CUDA

Git

TensorBoard

Job description

Palona AI in the United States seeks an AI Research Engineer with a strong CV and vision-language background to build visual intelligence for restaurant environments. You will develop models for scene understanding, detection, tracking, and multimodal reasoning, and collaborate with product and engineering to deploy production-ready systems.

Ideal candidates have 3+ years of CV or multimodal research, a PhD or research-focused masters, and hands-on PyTorch experience.