
Founding ML Engineer, Computer Vision (Item Identification)
Moe
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
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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
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Define what "accurate enough" means per category, and build calibrated confidence scoring so the product can say "we're not sure" instead of guessing
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Build the feedback loop between model errors and what gets labeled next, in partnership with the labeling lead
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Decide where to invest: broader category coverage vs. deeper accuracy on today's categories
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Own the model serving path from research to production โ latency, cost, and reliability at scale
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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
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5+ years in applied computer vision, with at least one system shipped to production at meaningful scale
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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)
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Strong fluency in PyTorch or TensorFlow, and experience fine-tuning and deploying vision transformers or CNNs in production
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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
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Comfortable being the most senior technical voice on a hard, open-ended problem with no existing internal playbook
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Strong written and verbal communication โ you'll need to explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders, including investors
Nice to have
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Prior work at a resale/marketplace company (StockX, GOAT, Vinted, Rebag, The RealReal) or a visual search company (Pinterest Lens, Google Lens, Syte)
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Experience with active learning or human-in-the-loop labeling pipelines
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Familiarity with deploying models behind low-latency APIs at scale
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Founding or early-stage startup experience, ideally as the first ML hire
What success looks like
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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
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60 days: v1 identification model is live for that category, with a measured accuracy baseline against a held-out test set
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90 days: confidence scoring is in place, and there's a clear, prioritized plan for expanding into the next 2โ3 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%โ1.5% equity (negotiable for the right candidate)