Founding ML Engineer & Data Platform Builder

Primitive; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental

Vision

Equity

Unlimited vacation

Equinox membership

Job summary

Primitive is hiring a founding ML / data engineer to build the pipeline that turns real hardware data into models and the models into product features. You’ll own ingestion, labeling, training infrastructure, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring, shaping ML at Primitive from the first production models onward.

This is the first dedicated ML hire, a build-from-zero role on a rich, real-world dataset with strong ownership and cross-team collaboration across data and hardware.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in ML / data engineering.
• Strong Python and ML tooling experience.
• Experience with data versioning, feature stores, and experiment tracking (e.g., DVC, LakeFS, MLflow, Weights & Biases).
• Production data pipeline experience with a data warehouse.
• AWS: S3, EKS/SageMaker, IAM security.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the data platform end-to-end: extend instrumentation where signals are missing today, then ingest from Postgres, SeaweedFS / S3, and streaming telemetry into a clean, versioned analytical layer
• Build the labeling workflow that lets us label hardware events without it becoming a permanent side project
• Design and operate a reproducible training stack on AWS — distributed where it needs to be, with experiment tracking, dataset versioning, and a real eval harness
• Ship inference for product features: low-latency serving where it matters, batch scoring where it fits
• Operate models in production: drift monitoring, regression gates, the dashboards that tell us when a model is silently rotting
• Partner with the full-stack and hardware teams to integrate predictions cleanly into the product surface
• Set the bar for ML rigor at Primitive: eval-first development, reproducibility, honest reporting of model quality
• Mentor new engineers on data and ML patterns as the team grows; raise the bar on data contracts, eval design, and reviewability

Skills

Python

Production ML

ML tooling

Experiment tracking

Tools

PyTorch

Hugging Face

Ray

DVC

LakeFS

MLflow

Weights & Biases

Airflow

Job description

Primitive is hiring a founding ML / data engineer to build the pipeline that turns real hardware data into models and the models into product features. You’ll own ingestion, labeling, training infrastructure, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring, shaping ML at Primitive from the first production models onward.

This is the first dedicated ML hire, a build-from-zero role on a rich, real-world dataset with strong ownership and cross-team collaboration across data and hardware.