Senior Computer Vision Research Engineer
Bobyard
| Company | Bobyard |
| Category | Engineering |
| Location | San Francisco |
| Remote | On-site (inferred) |
| Employment | Not stated |
| Level | Senior |
| Salary | USD 200k–250k |
| Posted | 19 Jul 2026 |
| Last verified | 3 Aug 2026 |
| Source | Employer ATS (ashby) |
Description
Position Overview
Join the AI lab bringing visual intelligent applications to the construction trades.
Contractors burn dozens of hours per project doing takeoffs by hand. We automate it — with models that have to be better than human, on messy real-world drawings.
You’ll have founder-level autonomy to design, execute, and iterate. We move at startup speed — no research silos, no “publish and forget.” You’ll become the world’s leading expert on the models you ship. We want world-class ML engineers with product taste and the ability to go heads down and produce exceptional systems.
Responsibilities
- Build SOTA CV models: Detect, segment, OCR, and reason over construction drawings. Accuracy isn’t academic — one mistake costs a customer millions.
- Own end-to-end pipelines: Data ingestion, labeling, training, eval, and low-latency inference. If it doesn’t run in prod, it doesn’t count.
- Scale performance: Accuracy, robustness, latency. Our models face 10,000+ drawing formats and they need to just work.
- Ship to production: Work closely with fullstack and product to integrate models into features customers use daily. No throwaway notebooks.
- Attack failure modes: Dig into real customer data. Find where we break, why we break, and fix it fast.
- Apply research pragmatically: Stay current with the field. Take what works, ship it next week, measure impact.
Senior Level Scope
- Architectural Stewardship: Having shipped extensively at Bobyard, you define the infrastructure strategy, ensuring our ML systems remain scalable, modular, and performant across the increasing diversity of construction trades we support.
- Trade-Expert Execution: You translate deep understanding of diverse construction trade requirements into model architectures. You don't just build models; you guide projects that require orchestration across multiple trades to solve complex, real-world takeoff challenges.
- Technical Leadership & Mentorship: You elevate the team by embedding your learned expertise into our engineering culture, guiding junior engineers through the nuances of production-grade CV and setting the bar for robust system design and testing.
- Strategic Project Ownership: You partner with Product and Engineering leadership to set the technical roadmap. You take ownership of high-impact, cross-functional projects, steering them from architectural ideation through to reliable production deployment.
- Final Arbiter of Quality: As a seasoned veteran of our model pipelines, you act as the ultimate decision-maker on release readiness, enforcing standards that protect the integrity of the high-stakes bids our customers rely on.
Desired Attributes
- Founder-level drive: You own model performance like it’s your company. No one tells you what to fix — you already know.
- Deep CV + DL chops: You’ve trained models that actually shipped. Segmentation, detection, document AI, vision-language — you’ve been in the trenches.
- Production killer: You’ve put ML into real products with real SLAs. You know the gap between 90% and 99.9% and how to close it.
- Messy data mindset: Real drawings are crooked, scanned, handwritten, and ugly. You love that. You turn noise into signal.
- Research-minded, execution-focused: You read papers, but you ship code. You bias to impact over elegance.
- Startup work ethic: This isn’t a research lab or a cushy big-tech role. We’re at war with manual takeoffs in a $13T industry. You want that.
- Learning machine: New architecture on Monday, beating our baseline by Friday. You navigate unknown problem spaces fast.
This is full-time & in-person in the SF Bay Area. Learning rate and dedication beat pedigree. If you can prove you’ll ship models our customers trust with million-dollar bids — at the speed and quality the market demands — we want you.
Comp Philosophy
We are proud to offer competitive, top-of-market compensation because we want to cele