Founding ML Engineer: Building AI for CAD Workflows

Rise Talent Advisors; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Rise Talent Advisors helps a San Francisco-based startup hire a founding machine learning and research engineer. The role focuses on reinforcement learning environments for CAD workflows, with equity included in the offer.

The position is hybrid, three days in the SF office, and involves turning research into production software for a hardware-oriented AI platform. You will work closely with engineers to translate design judgment into ML problems, build evaluators, and own projects from

Qualifications

• 3+ years as a machine learning engineer with production experience and multimodal work.
• Experience with reinforcement learning environments, building or using them for post-training.
• Hardware connection: degree in electrical or mechanical engineering or close collaboration with engineers.
• Knowledge of CAD, electrical CAD, 3D vision, or other hardware-adjacent ML.
• Foundational ML experience including models you have built and trained, not only applications on top of others' models.
• Senior ownership of your work; able to set a research plan and ship it with limited supervision.
• US citizenship or permanent residency; this role cannot sponsor visas.
• You can be in the San Francisco office three days a week.

Responsibilities

• Design and improve reinforcement learning environments reflecting real CAD workflows and constraints.
• Build evaluations and graders to measure if an agent completes hardware design work well.
• Take ML from research to production, including evaluations, data pipelines, and infrastructure.
• Collaborate with electrical and mechanical engineers to translate design judgments into ML problems and signals.
• Advance AI for hardware engineering tasks that are visual and spatial, tied to physical parts.
• Own research end to end from question to experiment to product path.

Job description

Rise Talent Advisors helps a San Francisco-based startup hire a founding machine learning and research engineer. The role focuses on reinforcement learning environments for CAD workflows, with equity included in the offer.

The position is hybrid, three days in the SF office, and involves turning research into production software for a hardware-oriented AI platform. You will work closely with engineers to translate design judgment into ML problems, build evaluators, and own projects from