Sr. AI Researcher, Agentic Systems

OpenSpace; United States; Remote; USD 184,000 - 265,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

PTOD

401(k) match

Parental leave

Home office stipend

Referral program

Company retreats

Job summary

OpenSpace, a US-based leader in AI-powered Visual Intelligence for construction, is hiring a Sr. AI Research Engineer. You will build agentic systems that reason over 360° imagery, BIM models, and field data to support on-site decision making.

You will design evaluations, select models, and ensure outputs are traceable to the source. The role requires 5+ years of ML experience, strong multimodal fluency, and a hands-on engineering mindset.

Qualifications

• MS/PhD in related field or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years building ML systems with at least one production LLM or VLM.
• Experience designing evaluations where ground truth is expensive, sparse, or contested.
• Strong multimodal fluency: vision-language models, embeddings and retrieval, context design, and fine-tuning when it earns its cost.
• Solid engineering: Python, async orchestration, tracing and cost instrumentation.
• Comfort with spatial data: coordinate frames, camera poses, and projections.
• Judgment about what is worth automating, and the willingness to say when the answer is nothing yet.

Responsibilities

• Design and build agent systems that plan and execute multi-step tasks across imagery, geometry, and documents.
• Own the context layer. Build retrieval and grounding over a spatially and temporally indexed site record so an agent gets the evidence a question actually needs.
• Design the tool surface: the primitives an agent calls to locate a component, compare two captures, read a region of a drawing, or query a BIM element.
• Build evaluations for tasks where ground truth is ambiguous, then use them to make honest calls about what is ready and what is not.
• Choose the right model for each step. Frontier API, open-weight model, fine-tuned small model, or classical CV, weighed against cost, latency, and accuracy at production volume.
• Make outputs traceable. Every claim should point back to the pixel, sheet, or spec section that supports it.
• Prototype quickly, kill what doesn’t work, and partner with platform engineers to ship what does.

Skills

ML systems in production

Multimodal vision-language

Python engineering

Spatial data familiarity

Automation judgment

Education

MS/PhD in related field or equivalent experience

Tools

Python

Async orchestration

Tracing

Cost instrumentation

Job description

At OpenSpace, we’re redefining how the world’s most complex projects are built. Our AI-powered Visual Intelligence Platform uses computer vision and spatial AI to give construction teams a real-time view of what’s happening on-site, helping them build faster, safer, and with greater confidence.

But what truly sets us apart is our people. We hire curious, driven teammates who love solving hard problems, taking ownership, and making a real-world impact. Great people build great culture—and apparently it shows. Forbes has named OpenSpace one of America’s Best Startup Employers five years in a row. Come see what all the fuss is about

The role:

The Sr. AI Research Engineer will build agentic systems that reason across the full OpenSpace data record: 360° imagery, point clouds, BIM models, drawing sets, and specifications, plus the newer streams coming off mobile capture, wearables, and field audio. Our computer vision team builds the perception primitives that determine what is in a capture. You will build the layer above, combining those primitives with frontier models to answer the questions project teams actually ask, and making the answers verifiable enough that a builder will act on them.

The work is applied research. The hard problems are deciding what an agent should see out of a four-dimensional site record, designing the tools it can call, and proving it is right often enough to ship. By the time you are calling a frontier API, the interesting decisions have already been made.

What you will be doing:

• Design and build agent systems that plan and execute multi-step tasks across imagery, geometry, and documents.
• Own the context layer. Build retrieval and grounding over a spatially and temporally indexed site record so an agent gets the evidence a question actually needs.
• Design the tool surface: the primitives an agent calls to locate a component, compare two captures, read a region of a drawing, or query a BIM element.
• Build evaluations for tasks where ground truth is ambiguous, then use them to make honest calls about what is ready and what is not.
• Choose the right model for each step. Frontier API, open-weight model, fine-tuned small model, or classical CV, weighed against cost, latency, and accuracy at production volume.
• Make outputs traceable. Every claim should point back to the pixel, sheet, or spec section that supports it.
• Prototype quickly, kill what doesn’t work, and partner with platform engineers to ship what does.

What we are looking for:

• M.S./Ph.D. in a related field or equivalent industry experience.
• 5+ years building ML systems, including at least one LLM or VLM-based system you took to production and kept running. We will ask what broke.
• Experience designing evaluations from scratch where ground truth is expensive, sparse, or contested.
• Strong multimodal fluency: vision-language models, embeddings and retrieval, context design, and fine-tuning when it earns its cost.
• Solid engineering. Python, async orchestration, tracing and cost instrumentation. You build your own harness.
• Comfort with spatial data. You don’t need SLAM depth, but coordinate frames, camera poses, and projections shouldn’t slow you down.
• Judgment about what is worth automating, and the willingness to say when the answer is nothing yet.

Nice to have:

• Post-training or reinforcement learning on agent trajectories.
• Document understanding over technical drawings, specifications, or other structured PDFs.
• Sensor streams beyond core imagery, such as mobile capture, wearables, or field audio.
• Experience in construction, robotics, geospatial, or another domain where models meet the physical world.

Base Salary:

$184,000 - $265,000

The Base Salary range represents the low and high end of the anticipated salary range for this position across all US locations including but not limited to CA, CO, NY, WA, NV, MD, CT and RI. The determination of this anticipated Base Salary involves the consideration of many factors in making compensation decisions including but not limited to: location of candidate, unique skill sets, experience, training, performance, licensure and certifications, as well as other business and organizational needs. Our anticipated Base Salary determination is just one component of OpenSpace’s competitive total rewards strategy that also includes equity awards, 401k match, as well as other region-specific health and wellness benefits.

Our US Benefits include:

• 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible paid time off
• 401(k) with company match
• Paid parental leave
• Home office stipend
• Employee referral program
• Annual company retreats and team gatherings

#LI-Remote

OpenSpace welcomes employees from varied backgrounds and walks of life, and it’s reflected in our diverse community. OpenSpace is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment, without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.