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# Technical Lead, Multimodal Research

- **Company:** SF MISSION, LLC
- **Location:** San Francisco, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Data Systems, Machine Learning, Language Modeling, Pytorch, Information Technology
- **Published:** September 25, 2026
- **Apply:** https://startup.jobs/technical-lead-multimodal-research-eventual-10188511

## About the Role

* 5+ years in applied computer vision or multimodal ML.
 * PhD or MS in computer science, electrical engineering, robotics, or applied mathematics with a computer vision or machine learning focus. A comparable publication or production record is acceptable in place of the degree.
 * Depth in modern vision and multimodal modeling - VLMs, VQA, embeddings, representation learning, detection, tracking, segmentation, retrieval - with judgment about what is deployable today rather than competitive on a leaderboard.
 * Hands-on training and evaluation of these models at scale on real video and sensor data, and comfort across the research and engineering boundary: PyTorch prototyping alongside inference performance, GPU utilization, throughput, and cost.
 * Background from a perception or multimodal team at a self-driving, robotics, or Physical AI company, a frontier research lab, or a visual-data company, ideally as the senior-most person on that problem.

## Description

As Technical Lead, Multimodal Research, you'll own the execution of our technical vision behind everything Eventual can understand about a video. Physical AI teams have video, lidar, radar, and sim outputs scattered across object stores with no way to find what they need without weeks of human annotation. Eventual runs vision/language models and pipelines over every clip in a corpus along axes the customer cares about (gripper type, failure mode, object class, scene, motion density), so a researcher can ask "left-arm grasp failures on deformable objects" and get a curated dataset in minutes.

You'll decide which models, representations, and evaluation methods get us there, and prove them in production at petabyte scale, over hundreds of thousands of hours of video. This is a senior individual contributor role rather than a management one: you set research direction and make the architectural decisions, while staying hands-on with papers, models, and experiments., * Own modeling strategy across the platform rather than one customer's taxonomy: which model families, representations, and training approaches we invest in, which get prototyped, and when to move off one.

 * Take approaches from prototype into production inference at corpus scale, working with the data systems and storage teams on what the index and the loader require.
 * Define the evaluation standard - the benchmarks and acceptance criteria any model meets before it reaches a customer.
 * Own the cost curve for understanding: architecture-level decisions on distillation, cascades, routing, and quantization that keep a 10K-hour corpus at single-digit cents per hour of video.
 * Translate customer research needs into scoped technical programs - taxonomy, model plan, datasets, quality instrumentation - and set the technical direction for multimodal work across the company. No direct reports.