Lead Applied Scientist - Computer Vision

techire ai; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Techire AI in San Francisco is seeking a Lead Applied Scientist to steer a Computer Vision team within our Spatial Intelligence group. This hands-on leadership role combines research with building state-of-the-art multimodal models across images, point clouds, meshes, and structured geometry.

You will work closely with the VP of AI to shape the research roadmap, review new ideas, mentor a high-caliber team, and contribute to model development while keeping your hands in code.

Qualifications

• Strong background in Computer Vision with leadership experience.
• Hands-on experience developing modern deep learning models.
• Experience with multimodal AI, 3D vision, or spatial AI is valuable.
• Ability to write code, review papers, and mentor researchers.

Responsibilities

• Leading and mentoring a team of Vision Scientists while remaining hands-on with research and model development.
• Building multimodal models across images, point clouds, meshes and structured geometry.
• Advancing transformer and diffusion-based architectures alongside representation learning techniques.
• Developing post-training pipelines using SFT and reinforcement learning.
• Partnering with the VP of AI to define the long-term vision research roadmap and technical direction.

Skills

Leadership

Research

Computer Vision

Multimodal AI

Job description

Lead Applied Scientist - Computer Vision

Interested in leading a Computer Vision team without giving up the research?

This is a hands-on leadership role within the Spatial Intelligence team of a $100M-backed AI company building multimodal foundation models for understanding the 3D world.

Working closely with the VP of AI, you'll shape the vision roadmap while leading a team of Vision Scientists building models across images, point clouds, meshes and structured geometry. You'll remain deeply involved in the research, contributing to model development, reviewing new ideas and mentoring a high-calibre team.

Your work will include:

• Leading and mentoring a team of Vision Scientists while remaining hands-on with research and model development.
• Building multimodal models across images, point clouds, meshes and structured geometry.
• Advancing transformer and diffusion-based architectures alongside representation learning techniques.
• Developing post-training pipelines using SFT and reinforcement learning.
• Partnering with the VP of AI to define the long-term vision research roadmap and technical direction.

This role is ideal for someone who has already led Machine Learning or Computer Vision teams but still enjoys solving technical problems themselves. They're looking for someone who wants to write code, review papers, experiment with new approaches and help others do the same.

You'll have a strong background in Computer Vision with recent leadership experience, alongside hands-on expertise developing modern deep learning models. Experience with multimodal AI, 3D vision, vision-language models or spatial AI would be particularly valuable, although researchers from broader vision backgrounds are encouraged to apply.

The company has raised over $100M, and the founder previously built and scaled a deep tech company through to a $1.6B exit. They're now investing heavily in expanding their AI research organisation.

SF Bay Area (remote initially, moving to hybrid from late 2026 with one day per week in the Bay Area and quarterly travel to HQ)

If you're looking for a leadership opportunity where you can continue building state-of-the-art vision models while shaping the future of a growing research team, we'd love to hear from you.