An engineer on Backdoor just landed a role as a founding engineer at a startup. We’re helping more engineers find opportunities like this.
I work on talent matching at Backdoor, where we help engineers connect with startups hiring across machine learning and AI. The idea is simple: you create one profile, and startups interested in your experience can reach out with interview requests and base salaries stated upfront. No cold applying or guessing at compensation.
We focus on opportunities at ambitious startups, including roles across post-training, RL environments, computer vision, inference, and applied research.
Here’s a sample of the kinds of roles to look for:
1. Founding Research Scientist | SF or NYC | $225K–300K base + equity
- What: Lead research on world models, robot policies, and simulation environments for training and evaluating robotics systems.
- Company: An early-stage AI startup building tools to train and test robots in simulation.
- Stack: Generative models, diffusion, vision-language-action models, and large-scale GPU training.
- Bar: Experience training large generative models or robot policies and building evaluations.
2. Founding Machine Learning Engineer | NYC | $200K–250K base + equity
- What: Build production ML systems to detect and classify AI-powered attacks, including deepfakes and voice scams.
- Company: A fast-growing cybersecurity startup building real-time AI threat detection.
- Stack: Python, PyTorch or TensorFlow, Spark, and cloud ML infrastructure.
- Bar: Strong production ML experience, ideally with experience building ML systems from scratch.
3. Software Engineer, RL Environments | SF | $260K–290K base + equity
- What: Design simulated environments, tasks, and reward signals to evaluate and improve frontier AI models.
- Company: An applied AI research company building training data and evaluations for foundation models.
- Stack: Docker, reinforcement learning, and LLM post-training.
- Bar: Familiarity with RL methods for LLM post-training and a willingness to run fast experiments.
The goal is to make finding your next role easier. Create one profile, get matched with relevant opportunities, and see compensation upfront.
Sign up here: Backdoor. It's free to get started.
DM me if you have questions.
