As the first AI hire, you will own the core multimodal reasoning engine for Alcor Labs' smart glasses. You'll ship agentic-VLM pipelines and real-time video understanding systems that assist technicians in the field. This role bridges frontier AI research and production-grade engineering, directly impacting high-stakes industrial workflows across aerospace and energy.
Founding AI Engineer at Alcor Labs
Join Alcor Labs as their Founding AI Engineer and build the future of industrial work. Backed by the PayPal mafia, Alcor Labs is developing an AI co-pilot delivered through smart glasses for manual workers in aerospace and defense. This is a rare chance to own the multimodal reasoning core of a hardware-integrated AI product from day one. If you have experience with VLMs, real-time video understanding, and a desire to ship at a 'founder-mode' pace in San Francisco, this high-equity role offers the opportunity to create a massive data moat for the next generation of robotics.
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Location
San Francisco, United States
Compensation
$160k-$220k + Equity
Company
Alcor Labs
Role overview
Vision AI, Wearable AI, field services, Robotics2–10+ employees
Building the AI co-pilot for manual workers starting with datacenter and energy infrastructure technicians. We give technicians smart-glasses with custom VLMs that automates hours of daily reporting, and can guide any user through any task. Already live with two multi-billion dollar companies.
Founders are: Elior - Harvard/NASA researcher in computer vision and physical AI (NeurIPS, ICCV) Gabriel - MIT Machine Learning, quant researcher in deep learning, quit to found Alcor.
What you will do
- Build and optimize agentic-VLM pipelines for real-time video and audio understanding, ensuring high-accuracy reasoning on constrained edge hardware like Meta-class smart glasses.
- Develop and maintain the evaluation and data flywheel that allows model quality to compound through real-world customer interactions in live French and US pilot programs.
- Deploy multimodal models on-prem for high-security industrial clients, handling the end-to-end stack from fine-tuning frontier models to edge inference optimization.
Who this is a fit for
- You graduated in 2019 or later and possess deep experience in visual AI reasoning, particularly with VLMs, multimodal LLMs, or scene-grounded video understanding.
- You have a proven track record of shipping AI to production in high-intensity environments such as SpaceX, Tesla Autopilot, or the Meta Reality Labs wearables team.
- You are a US-based builder with an appetite for founder-mode pace, ideally with previous experience deploying AI models on hardware like wearables, robotics, or drones.
Why this role is remarkable
- Join as the first AI engineer after the founders, securing a significant equity stake of up to 2.0% in a venture backed by elite Silicon Valley investors.
- Work at the absolute frontier of egocentric vision, building real-time VLMs that process live video streams to assist workers in high-IP industrial environments like defense and aerospace.
- Direct path to building a massive data moat of 500k+ hours of skilled labor video, positioning the company as a primary data provider for future robotics foundation-model labs.
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I get to know what you’re great at, then find roles you’d never find yourself.Ok, I'll go first. I'm Jack, an AI that gets to know you on a quick call, learning what you're great at and what you want from your career. Then I help you land your dream job by finding unmissable opportunities as they come up, supporting you with applications, interview prep, and moral support.
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