Founding AI Engineer

Founding AI Engineer (BJAK) Join to apply for the Founding AI Engineer role at BJAK. A1 is a self‑funded AI group operating in full stealth, building a new global consumer AI application focused on an underexplored use case. Transform Language Models Into Real‑world, High-impact Product Experiences. You will shape the core technical direction of A1—model selection, training strategy, infrastructure, and long‑term architecture. This founding technical role defines our model stack, data strategy, and product capabilities for years ahead. You won’t just fine‑tune models—you’ll design systems: training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, inference stacks, and scalable deployment architectures. You have full autonomy to experiment with frontier models (LLaMA, Mistral, Qwen, Claude‑compatible architectures) and build new approaches where existing ones fall short. Why This Role Matters Creating the intelligence layer of A1’s first product, defining how it understands, reasons, and interacts with users. Shaping the entire technical foundation—architectures, pipelines, inference systems, and scalability. Working beyond typical chatbot use cases, requiring original thinking, experimentation, and contrarian insight. Influencing product direction and steering early use cases. Joining as a founding builder, setting engineering standards, contributing to culture, and shaping a meaningful AI application. What You’ll Do Build end-to-end training pipelines: data → training → eval → inference. Design new model architectures or adapt open-source frontier models. Fine‑tune models using state-of-the-art methods (LoRA/QLoRA, SFT, DPO, distillation). Architect scalable inference systems using vLLM / TensorRT‑LLM / DeepSpeed. Build data systems for high-quality synthetic and real-world training data. Develop alignment, safety, and guardrail strategies. Design evaluation frameworks across performance, robustness, safety, and bias. Own deployment: GPU optimization, latency reduction, scaling policies. Shape early product direction, experiment with new use cases, and build AI‑powered experiences from zero. Explore frontier techniques: retrieval-augmented training, Mixture-of-Experts, distillation, multi-agent orchestration, multimodal models. What It’s Like To Work Here Ownership—solve problems end-to-end rather than waiting for perfect instructions. Learn through action—prototype → test → iterate → ship. Calm in ambiguity—zero-to‑one building energises you. Bias toward speed with discipline—V1 now > perfect later. See failures and feedback as essential to growth. Work with humility, curiosity, and a founder’s mindset. Lift the bar for yourself and teammates every day. Requirements Strong background in deep learning and transformer architectures. Hands‑on experience training or fine‑tuning large models (LLMs or vision models). Proficiency with PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow. Experience with distributed training frameworks (DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron, ZeRO, Ray). Strong software engineering skills—writing robust, production-grade systems. Experience with GPU optimisation: memory efficiency, quantisation, mixed precision. Comfortable owning ambiguous, zero-to-one technical problems end-to-end. Nice to Have Experience with LLM inference frameworks (vLLM, TensorRT‑LLM, FasterTransformer). Contributions to open-source ML libraries. Background in scientific computing, compilers, or GPU kernels. Experience with RLHF pipelines (PPO, DPO, ORPO). Experience training or deploying multimodal or diffusion models. Experience in large-scale data processing (Apache Arrow, Spark, Ray). Prior work in a research lab (Google Brain, DeepMind, FAIR, Anthropic, OpenAI). What You’ll Get Extreme ownership and autonomy from day one—define and build key model systems. Founding-level influence over technical direction, model architecture, and product strategy. Remote‑first flexibility. High-impact scope—your work becomes core infrastructure of a global consumer AI product. Competitive compensation and performance-based bonuses. Backing of a profitable US$2B group, with the speed of a startup. Insurance coverage, flexible time off, and global travel insurance. Opportunity to shape a new global AI product from zero. A small, senior, high-performance team where you collaborate directly with founders and influence every major decision. Our Team & Culture We operate as a dense, senior, high-performance team. We value clarity, speed, craftsmanship, and relentless ownership. We behave like founders—build, ship, iterate, and hold ourselves to a high technical bar. If you value excellence, enjoy building real systems, and want to be part of a small team creating something globally impactful, you’ll thrive here. About A1 A1 is a self-funded, independent AI group backed by BJAK, focused on building a new consumer AI product with global impact. We’re assembling a small, elite team of ML and engineering builders who want to work on meaningful, high-impact problems. Seniority level: Mid-Senior level Employment type: Full-time Job function: Engineering and Information Technology; Industries: Software Development #J-18808-Ljbffr