Principal ML Research Engineer

San Francisco 2 days agoFull-time External
1.7k - 3.2k / yr
Build AI that talks, negotiates rates, and enables autonomous movement of trucks from pickup to delivery Demo of AI booking a shipment in 10 minutes by speaking to 96 trucking companies simultaneously The problem If Walmart needs to move a truck of avocados from California to Chicago, today they must: • Speak with 50+ trucking companies • Check weight and temperature requirements • Negotiate price and availability • Do it one call at a time This process takes hours and thousands of phone calls every day across the industry. What we’re building We’re building AI agents that do this work automatically. • Calls and emails dozens of trucking companies at once • Checks requirements (weight, temperature, lanes) • Negotiates prices in parallel • Books a truck in minutes, not hours Proof it works 👉 In this demo, our AI spoke to 96 trucking companies simultaneously and booked a shipment in under 10 minutes - https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7394069447327555584 Why this is exciting • You’ll work on AI that handles real-world transactions through phone calls • Real-world, high-stakes work enabling autonomous logistics - think moving a truck from Chicago to Texas, fully coordinated by AI • Small team, high ownership, fast iteration • Hard problems that don’t exist in benchmarks What we’ll work on Train & Tune Models Fine-tune transcribers and speech models for real-time voice agents operating on live phone calls. • Enable real time transcriber fine-tuning based on caller context • Improve transcription accuracy for domain-specific language under noisy conditions • Fine-tune interruption models on domain-specific conversations • Post-Train speech models for intonations, pacing and naturalness and avoiding robotic cadence LLM optimization • Structuring modules, and policies that compose cleanly • Optimizing LLM outputs for brevity, correctness, and timing • Reducing drift across long, multi-turn conversations • Evaluating changes against real call outcomes, not just text metrics Evaluation & iteration You’ll help define how we measure quality across: • Transcription accuracy where it actually matters • Voice naturalness as judged by listeners • Conversation efficiency and completion You can be a great fit, if: • ML Engineer with Real-World Experience – You’ve trained and shipped models in production. Bonus if you’ve worked with LLMs or audio models. • Fluent in Modern ML Stack – You know your way around Python, PyTorch, and today’s ML tools - from training pipelines to evaluation benchmarks. • Execution-Oriented – You move fast, take ownership, and focus on solving real problems over perfect ones. • Startup-Ready – You’re adaptable, resilient, and energized by ambiguity and fast-changing priorities. • Clear Communicator & Team Player – You collaborate well across functions and push decisions forward. Details • Cash + Equity • Location: San Francisco, CA, US