The OpportunityLiquid AI's models ship inside real products, including vehicles from flagship automotive design partners with hard production release dates.
This role sits at the center of that work: you will run the day-to-day model development pipeline for our marquee automotive engagement, working directly with the engineer who leads our embedded customer R&D.
You will take ambiguous feature requests from partner product teams and turn them into trained, evaluated, production-ready model checkpoints. Over your first months, the end-to-end pipeline (requirements, data generation, training, evaluation) is progressively handed to you until you operate it autonomously.
What We're Looking ForWe need someone who:
- Runs with it: You take a loosely-defined task and drive it to done without waiting for step-by-step direction.
- Client-ready communicator: You can explain something technical you built from first principles to someone with zero context, clearly and without jargon. You will do this daily, with partners and internally.
- High energy, high urgency: You move fast, you like shipping against real deadlines, and crunch periods around releases don't faze you.
- Low ego: You are happy doing the unglamorous work that makes fast-moving projects hold together: cleaning data, polishing deliverables, building dashboards, documenting.
- Comfortable with shifting requirements: Partner specs change constantly. You treat that as the job, not an annoyance.
The Work- Join partner calls, work with partner product managers, and translate broad, ambiguous feature specs into concrete model training requirements.
- Own the core fine-tuning recipe for an on-device audio-to-function-calling model: keep tool calling accurate and reliable across all supported languages.
- Generate, clean, and analyze training data; build and maintain the large-scale data pipelines that feed training.
- Run training and evaluation cycles against partner requirements on a continuous loop through major software releases.
- Make fast-moving work presentable: dashboards, analyses, documentation, and polished partner-facing deliverables.
- Progressively take ownership of the end-to-end model development pipeline, from spec intake through delivered checkpoint.
Desired ExperienceMust-have:- Hands-on machine learning experience: roughly 2+ years, though we are open to exceptional early-career candidates with strong internship track records.
- You have personally trained models end-to-end, in any modality (computer vision, ADAS, LLMs, audio). Building applications around model APIs does not qualify.
- Experience working with large-scale data pipelines and wrangling large volumes of data.
- Experience in an automotive, embedded-device, or on-device ML context, and the instinct to reason from first principles about those environments.
- Strong communication skills; this is a client-facing role.
Nice-to-have:- Audio or speech model experience.
- Function calling / tool-use fine-tuning experience.
- Multilingual model or data experience.
- Background at automotive, autonomous vehicle, or defense research labs.
What Success Looks Like (Year One)- Within six months, you have made a non-trivial, quantifiable impact on a marquee automotive engagement, validated directly by partner feedback on service quality.
- You operate the core model development pipeline (requirements, data generation, training, evaluation) autonomously across a major software release.
- Function-calling quality holds across an expanding set of supported languages while new capabilities are layered onto the model.
What We Offer- End-to-end ownership: within months you run a production model pipeline for a global automotive partner, with direct mentorship from the engineer who built it.
- Compensation: Competitive base salary with equity in a unicorn-stage company
- Health: We pay 100% of medical, dental, and vision premiums for employees and dependents
- Financial: 401(k) matching up to 4% of base pay
- Time Off: Unlimited PTO plus company-wide Refill Days throughout the year
