Founding AI/ML Research Engineer

Transform language models into real-world, high-impact product experiences. A1 is a self-funded AI division backed by BJAK, operating in full stealth. We're building a new global consumer AI application focused on an important but underexplored use case — something practical, meaningful, and far beyond the typical chatbot or productivity agent. As a Machine Learning Engineer, you will work at the core of our product: fine-tuning frontier-level models, shaping data pipelines, evaluating behavior, and bringing intelligent features into real production environments. You'll operate with high autonomy within a small, deeply technical team. Why This Role Matters You will turn state-of-the-art models into real product capabilities used by a global audience. You'll define how our models behave — accuracy, safety, tone, and user experience. You'll help build a new consumer AI product from zero, directly influencing its technical and product direction. Your work will ensure our models are not only powerful, but safe, reliable, and impactful at scale. What You'll Do Fine-tune and adapt models as needed while also designing new model architectures and training pipelines from scratch Design and curate datasets, craft prompts, and experiment with alignment and safety strategies for high-quality outputs. Build evaluation pipelines for model performance, safety, and alignment, and innovate on new metrics for real-world impact. Ship models to production, optimise for latency and scale, and monitor drift or degradation Collaborate with product, engineering, and design to launch polished, user-facing AI features Explore new modeling approaches, optimisation methods, and product use cases What It's Like to Work Here You take ownership - you solve problems end-to-end rather than wait for perfect instructions You learn through action - prototype → test → iterate → ship You're calm in ambiguity - zero-to-one building energises you You bias toward speed with discipline - V1 now > perfect later You see failures and feedback as essential to growth You work with humility, curiosity, and a founder's mindset You lift the bar for yourself and your teammates every day Requirements Strong experience with transformers, deep learning, and fine-tuning methods (LoRA/QLoRA, SFT, distillation) Proficiency in PyTorch (preferred) or TensorFlow Experience in prompt engineering and dataset creation for alignment, tone, trust, and safety Familiarity with evaluation methods: perplexity, toxicity, relevance, robustness Solid software engineering fundamentals — algorithms, data structures, clean code Ability to operate in a fast, lean, and high-ownership environment Nice to Have Experience with text generation, moderation, ranking, or personalisation Exposure to RLHF or reinforcement learning for LLMs Contributions to open-source ML projects Background in consumer-facing AI products or high-growth startups What You'll Get High ownership and autonomy from day one Direct involvement in technical direction and product decisions Remote-first flexibility A high-impact role with visibility across ML, engineering, and 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 Our Team & Culture We operate as a dense, senior, high-performance team. We value clarity, speed, craftsmanship, and relentless ownership. We behave like founders — we 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 division under BJAK, focused on building a new consumer AI product with global relevance. We're in full stealth and assembling a small, elite team of ML and engineering builders who want to work on meaningful, high-impact problems.