Senior Applied Research Scientist - Foundation Model

Who we are:
Ambient.ai is a unified, AI-powered physical security platform helping the world’s leading enterprises reduce risk, improve operational efficiency, and gain critical insights. Seven of the top 10 U.S. technology companies, along with multiple Fortune 500 organizations, rely on Ambient.ai to modernize their physical security infrastructure.

Our platform uses advanced AI and computer vision to seamlessly integrate with existing camera and sensor systems, enabling real-time monitoring and proactive threat detection. By reducing false alarms by over 95%, Ambient.ai allows security teams to focus on real threats and prevent incidents before they occur.

Founded in 2017 and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and Allegion Ventures, Ambient.ai is a Series B company on a mission to make every security incident preventable.

We’ve found that in-person time meaningfully supports collaboration, creativity, and team alignment. Our engineering, product, design, and marketing teams work from our Redwood City office 3 days per week. All other Bay Area employees join on Fridays to stay connected and close out the week together.

Ready to learn more? Connect with us on LinkedIn and YouTube

About the role:

Ambient.ai is seeking a Senior Applied Research Scientist to develop next-generation vision-language models optimized for edge devices. For physical security scenarios, you’ll design, train, and deploy VLMs that understand video, images, and text in real time. This role emphasizes efficiency, robustness, and real-world performance on resource-constrained edge infrastructure.

You’ll lead full-cycle model development, from pre-training and fine-tuning on image-language data to applying distillation and compression techniques for deployment. This is a hands-on, cross-functional role in which your work will directly impact our ability to prevent threats and reduce false alarms across enterprise environments.

What you'll do:

• Develop & Optimize VLMs for Edge: Design and optimize transformer-based vision-language models to understand images and text, ensuring real-time performance on compute-constrained edge devices.

• Pre-training & Fine-tuning: Own the full training pipeline—from pre-training on image-text data to fine-tuning for Ambient.ai’s physical security use cases (e.g., activity or object recognition from camera feeds).

• Model Compression & Optimization: Apply techniques like distillation, quantization, and pruning to reduce model size and latency, enabling efficient edge deployment without major accuracy loss.

• Leverage Open-Source & Innovate: Use and extend state-of-the-art open-source models. Prototype new architectures and training methods to advance Ambient.ai’s multimodal AI research.

• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work with engineering and product teams to integrate models into the platform. Iterate based on real-world feedback and deployment data to improve performance.

• Research and Experimentation: Stay current with vision, NLP, and multimodal AI research. Design experiments to test new algorithms and continually enhance our core AI systems.

What you'll bring:

• Ph.D. or Master’s in CS, EE, or related field, with a strong foundation in AI/ML (Ph.D. preferred or Master’s with strong experience).

• Proficient in Python and deep learning frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow. Comfortable with large-scale training pipelines.

• Hands-on experience with CNNs, Transformers, and Vision Transformers (ViT). Strong understanding of vision-language models and how to fine-tune or adapt them.

• Proven skills in model training and optimization, including fine-tuning on large datasets and applying distillation, quantization, or similar techniques. Experience with foundation or multimodal models is a plus.

• Strong problem-solving ability: quick prototyping, diagnosing failure cases, and iterating on solutions.

• Startup experience preferred: Comfortable with ambiguity, fast iteration, and owning projects end-to-end.

Salary and Equity:

At Ambient.ai, we take a market-based approach to compensation. Final offers are based on job-related skills, experience, location, and internal equity.

Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package, including stock options and the opportunity to share in the company’s growth.

The starting base salary range for this role in Redwood City: $180,000 - $200,000

Why join us:

• We are creating an entirely new category within a 180+ billion-dollar physical security industry and looking for team members who are also passionate about our mission to prevent every security incident possible 

• We partner with an incredible customer roster of F500 companies, including Adobe, TikTok, Gap and SentinelOne

• Regular Full-time employees receive stock options for the opportunity to share ownership in the success of our company 

• Comprehensive health + welfare package (Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, EAP, Legal Services, 401k plan)

• We offer flexible time off to rest and recharge, including Winter Break (time off between Christmas and New Year’s for most roles, depending on customer demand)

• The latest tech and awesome swag will be delivered to your door

• Enjoy a full range of opportunities to connect with your awesome co-workers

• We love to hike, are foodies, and love music! Check out our most recent Ambient Spotify Playlist

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Ambient.ai is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.  Ambient does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, legally protected medical condition, family care status, military or veteran status, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other basis protected by local, state, or federal laws. Ambient is an E-Verify participant.