Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Senior ML Engineer

Be the ML force multiplier at a funded stealth startup solving hard on-device AI problems.

ABOUT THE COMPANY

A stealth startup in the identity space building privacy-preserving, on-device authentication via voice biometrics. Backed by $2.4M in pre-seed funding with large enterprise clients already in the pipeline. The core technical challenge: compressing 5GB ML models to under 5MB without sacrificing accuracy. Small team, real traction, massive upside.

WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS

We need someone who brings a different gear — modern tooling, fast experimentation, and a bias toward shipping. You won't be inheriting a broken system; you'll be raising the ceiling on what this team can do. This is the kind of role where the right person becomes indispensable within 90 days.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

Drive high-velocity experimentation on voice embedding models — speaker verification, liveness detection, age estimation

Own model compression end-to-end — quantization, pruning, distillation — to hit aggressive on-device size and latency constraints

Build modern ML infrastructure — experiment tracking, fast eval loops, reproducible pipelines — so the team can iterate at a different pace

Deploy optimized models to iOS and Android via CoreML, TFLite, or ONNX Runtime and own their performance in production

Partner with the co-founder to define the ML roadmap and unblock enterprise client integrations

YOU ARE THE RIGHT FIT IF

You've shipped production ML models and measure yourself by what's deployed, not what's in a notebook

You run 10 experiments where others run 2 — fast iteration is your default, not a mode you shift into

You live in modern tooling — Weights & Biases, HuggingFace, modal, or equivalent — and have strong opinions about what a good ML stack looks like

5+ years of applied ML engineering with deep PyTorch or JAX fluency across the full training loop

Hands-on experience with model compression — you've hit real size and latency walls and engineered your way through them

Startup-ready: you set your own direction, don't wait to be unblocked, and thrive when the brief is "figure it out"

NICE TO HAVE

Background in audio/speech ML — speaker verification, voice activity detection, or audio embeddings

Experience with on-device deployment via CoreML, TFLite, or ONNX

Familiarity with privacy-preserving ML — federated learning, on-device inference, differential privacy

Prior experience at an early-stage startup — you know the difference between building for scale and building to learn

Originally posted on Himalayas