Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Vision AI

Role overview

Architect and build the platform that turns restaurant video into useful observations and operational metrics. This is a hands-on principal engineering role with ownership of technical direction: you will design core infrastructure, integrate machine learning capabilities, and deliver vision-powered features across customer-facing products.

Responsibilities

- Design and implement the video platform, covering capture, ingestion, storage, processing, and delivery with security and reliability in mind. - Build services that process footage, run vision models, and produce actionable observations and metrics. - Choose and integrate vision and vision-language models, and create inference, evaluation, and production monitoring systems. - Deliver customer-facing use cases and establish architecture that supports present needs and future growth. - Write production code, prototype ideas, and ship platform capabilities while working with partner teams on integrations. - Mentor engineers, promote AI-assisted development workflows, and set standards for reliability, security, privacy, and platform quality.

Requirements

- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including production distributed systems and data pipelines at scale. - Cloud infrastructure experience, preferably AWS, plus event-driven systems, storage, and APIs. - Strong backend programming skills in Kotlin, Java, or a similar language, with Python experience. - Experience operating production ML systems, including inference pipelines, evaluation, and model monitoring; familiarity with video streams, codecs, and tools such as ffmpeg. - Ability to take unclear ideas from prototype to customer-ready production systems and make pragmatic architecture choices. - Continued hands-on production coding, daily use of AI coding tools or agent harnesses, and experience with LLM or vision-language APIs. - Clear communication and ability to align engineering and product partners on technical decisions.

Benefits and work setup

The position uses a hybrid work model, with office expectations dependent on region. Compensation includes a base salary, potentially supplemented by cash compensation, equity, and benefits. Listed base salary bands are $230,000–$368,000, $200,000–$320,000, and $180,000–$288,000 USD, depending on geographic zone.