Head of AI Foundation Models (Remote)

Quiet Capital; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 230,000 - 330,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental

Life insurance

Unlimited vacation

401k with match

Job summary

Merlin Labs in the United States seeks a seasoned AI/ML leader to own the foundation and world-model work, shaping architecture, post-training strategy, and the capability roadmap for autonomy.

You will mentor a small team of world-model and post-training engineers, define interfaces to the autonomy stack, and establish evaluation, safety, and certification partnership practices across engineering, safety, and regulators.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building AI systems with 3+ years leading technical teams.
• Proven ownership of learned systems deployed in real-time products.
• Strong PyTorch experience and ability to read C++ real-time code.
• Clear written communication for regulators and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Technical strategy: own foundation and world-model work and roadmap.
• Lead and mentor a small team of world-model engineers.
• Design model interfaces to the autonomy stack with deterministic verification.
• Define evaluation harnesses, taxonomy, and regression suites.
• Establish uncertainty quantification and out-of-distribution detection.
• Benchmark learned vs rule-based planning across mission profiles.
• Collaborate with Certification and Systems Engineering to stay defensible.
• Monitor external research and decide what to adopt or ignore.

Skills

Leadership

PyTorch

C++ RTS

Architecture design

Education

Degree in CS/AI or related

Tools

PyTorch

C++

Job description

Merlin Labs in the United States seeks a seasoned AI/ML leader to own the foundation and world-model work, shaping architecture, post-training strategy, and the capability roadmap for autonomy.

You will mentor a small team of world-model and post-training engineers, define interfaces to the autonomy stack, and establish evaluation, safety, and certification partnership practices across engineering, safety, and regulators.