AI/ML Research Engineer | YC W26 | Seed Stage | San Francisco
Our client is a YC W26 startup building AI agents that operate computers the way a human does - simulating mouse clicks and keyboard inputs to automate workflows across legacy systems, desktop applications, and browser portals with zero API integrations. They are already deployed in production across Healthcare, Banking, and Insurance.
The role
They are hiring their first US-based research engineer. This is a founding team role - you will own the architecture, not just contribute to it. You will define how their agentic systems reason, plan, and act across complex visual environments. Your work will ship into production and directly impact real customers from day one.
What they are looking for
1. Recent PhD or Master's graduate from a top-tier CS or AI programme, ideally within the last three years
2. Strong research background in agentic orchestration and multi-agent systems - this is the primary requirement
3. Experience with reasoning models and chain-of-thought architectures
4. Hands-on experience with vision language models and visual reasoning in applied environments
5. Publications at top venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, EMNLP, ACL, CVPR) are a strong plus
6. Background from a deep tech startup or top university research lab