Founding Engineer

💼 About the role
As Founding Engineer, you'll help establish our New York engineering team, shipping features across the YOLO ML/computer vision surface and the platform around it. You'll connect model capabilities with usable interfaces, reliable APIs, and production infrastructure.

“Founding” means end-to-end ownership, not a queue of assigned tickets. You'll define scope, make architectural decisions, write and review code, deploy changes, and own production outcomes.

This is a hands-on senior engineer with tech-lead responsibility, not a people-management requirement. You'll use AI coding tools daily and coordinate with colleagues in the UK, Spain, and China through clear plans, async communication, and accountable delivery.

🚀 What you'll do
Strategy & execution

Own a feature area from requirements and architecture through implementation, testing, deployment, and iteration.

Ship ML/CV capabilities alongside full-stack interfaces, backend services, and infrastructure, using our documentation and guides.

Use Copilot or Codex routinely, validating generated code for correctness, security, and maintainability.

Cross-functional collaboration

Break ambiguous work into milestones, align dependencies across locations, and communicate decisions and blockers asynchronously.

Balance customer needs, technical trade-offs, and commercial deadlines with Product and Engineering.

Representation & leadership

Lead design and code reviews, unblock engineers, and set standards for testing, observability, and production reliability.

Strengthen our open-source ecosystem through maintainable contributions, technical documentation, and engineering knowledge-sharing.

🧠 Skills and experience
Core requirements

Senior-to-principal/distinguished-level industry delivery, with sustained ownership of feature areas and tech-lead-level accountability.

Shipped ML/AI and computer vision work, with practical Python and PyTorch proficiency beyond coursework or research.

Full-stack capability spanning user interfaces, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, deployment, and production operations.

Current AI-assisted development experience, sound review judgment, and a preference for mainstream, well-documented tools.

Strong async communication, work breakdown, and deadline delivery within structured teams; no degree required, but industry experience is essential.

Nice to have

Production experience with TypeScript, React, and Python API frameworks such as FastAPI.

Experience with PostgreSQL, Docker, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and cloud platforms.

Hands-on model serving, GPU optimization, inference monitoring, or edge deployment experience.

Contributions to Ultralytics or other open-source projects and engagement with our developer community.

Early engineering experience building products and establishing technical practices across international teams.