About the RoleThis is an equal co-founder opportunity, not a conventional senior hire. You will own all technical and research strategy at an early-stage creative AI marketplace, joining at the ground floor with meaningful equity and full responsibility for shaping the product, the data infrastructure, and the research roadmap.
What You'll Do- Own technical and research strategy end to end, from current workflows to a proprietary training and evaluation platform for creative AI agents.
- Build data infrastructure that connects briefs, creator submissions, generation traces, decisions, critique, and campaign outcomes.
- Design systems that evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and continuously improve creative work.
- Develop the allocation policy that directs campaign budget and simultaneously shapes dataset collection.
- Make core decisions on frontier model usage, fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, and original research directions.
- Set standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.
- Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team.
- Work directly with creators, brands, and investors.
What We're Looking For- Hands-on experience building preference or reward models, including RLHF, reward modeling, ranking subjective outputs, or evaluation systems.
- Comfort with causal inference on observational data: selection bias, off-policy or counterfactual evaluation, adaptive experimentation, or validating cheap proxies against delayed outcomes.
- Production ML experience in ads, marketplace, recommender, or ranking systems tied to real business outcomes.
- Experience with bandits, sequential allocation, or online experimentation at scale.
- A track record of shipping real products or features used by real people, not only research prototypes.
- Experience owning a model, evaluation, or infrastructure program end to end.
- Experience recruiting and leading strong technical teams.
- Background at a frontier AI lab or research organization of comparable caliber is a strong signal.
- Multimodal generation, agents, planning systems, or latent-variable modeling experience is valued.
- Prior founder experience, including ventures that have since ended, is a plus.
- High agency, intellectual honesty, low ego, and genuine curiosity about creativity and human feedback.
- Able to commit full-time, in person in San Francisco, as an equal co-founder.
Compensation & Benefits- Equity: approximately 28% as an equal co-founder
- Cash compensation: discussed directly based on circumstances and fit
LocationOn-site, full-time in San Francisco, California, United States.
