Moe logo

Founding ML Engineer, Computer Vision (Item Identification)

Moe

On-siteSan Francisco, CAmid$200kโ€“$260kPosted 15h ago

Job description

About the role

Moe's entire pitch to users rests on one claim: we can identify any item in the world from a photo and price it as accurately as a human expert, instantly. You'll build the model that makes that claim true. This isn't a research exercise โ€” every category you get right becomes a category users trust Moe with real money, and every one you get wrong becomes a support ticket and a churn risk. You'll set the technical direction for identification from day one, with real ownership over architecture, data strategy, and the accuracy bar we hold ourselves to.

What you'll do

  • Design and own the computer vision architecture for fine-grained item identification โ€” brand, model, edition, variant โ€” starting from foundation vision models and fine-tuning toward Moe's specific catalog

  • Define what "accurate enough" means per category, and build calibrated confidence scoring so the product can say "we're not sure" instead of guessing

  • Build the feedback loop between model errors and what gets labeled next, in partnership with the labeling lead

  • Decide where to invest: broader category coverage vs. deeper accuracy on today's categories

  • Own the model serving path from research to production โ€” latency, cost, and reliability at scale

  • Represent the identification model's capabilities and limits to the rest of the company, including in investor and customer conversations when needed

What we're looking for

  • 5+ years in applied computer vision, with at least one system shipped to production at meaningful scale

  • Hands-on experience with fine-grained/instance-level classification, not just general object detection โ€” you've worked on a problem where "close" isn't good enough (e.g., telling two similar sneaker colorways or watch references apart)

  • Strong fluency in PyTorch or TensorFlow, and experience fine-tuning and deploying vision transformers or CNNs in production

  • Experience designing and running evaluation frameworks for vision models โ€” you know how to measure whether a model is actually getting better, not just achieving a lower loss

  • Comfortable being the most senior technical voice on a hard, open-ended problem with no existing internal playbook

  • Strong written and verbal communication โ€” you'll need to explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders, including investors

Nice to have

  • Prior work at a resale/marketplace company (StockX, GOAT, Vinted, Rebag, The RealReal) or a visual search company (Pinterest Lens, Google Lens, Syte)

  • Experience with active learning or human-in-the-loop labeling pipelines

  • Familiarity with deploying models behind low-latency APIs at scale

  • Founding or early-stage startup experience, ideally as the first ML hire

What success looks like

  • 30 days: fully ramped on the current state of the identification problem; has picked the first category to ship (e.g., sneakers or watches) and defined the accuracy bar for it

  • 60 days: v1 identification model is live for that category, with a measured accuracy baseline against a held-out test set

  • 90 days: confidence scoring is in place, and there's a clear, prioritized plan for expanding into the next 2โ€“3 categories

Process

Intro call โ†’ technical deep dive on a past project โ†’ a scoped take-home or pairing session on a real Moe identification problem โ†’ founder conversation โ†’ offer

Comp:

$200Kโ€“$260K base + 0.75%โ€“1.5% equity (negotiable for the right candidate)