---
title: 'Member of Engineering (Multimodality - Research Lead) at Poolside'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-engineering-multimodality-research-lead-poolside-emea-east-coast-ez383edgg6zh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Member of Engineering (Multimodality - Research Lead) at Poolside

- **Company:** Poolside
- **Location:** EMEA / East Coast, United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-07-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/poolside/0d16412c-58a2-464c-8407-6413210a8c72

## Job description

## ABOUT POOLSIDE

In this decade, the world will create Artificial General Intelligence. There will only be a small number of companies who will achieve this. Their ability to stack advantages and pull ahead will define the winners. These companies will move faster than anyone else. They will attract the world's most capable talent. They will be on the forefront of applied research, engineering, infrastructure and deployment at scale. They will continue to scale their training to larger & more capable models. They will be given the right to raise large amounts of capital along their journey to enable this. They will create powerful economic engines. They will obsess over the success of their users and customers.

Poolside exists to be this company: to build a world where AI will be the engine behind economically valuable work and scientific progress. We believe the fastest way to reach AGI lies in accelerating software development itself, by reshaping the developer experience with agentic systems, coding assistants, and the open-weight frontier models that power them.

## ABOUT OUR TEAM

We were founded in the US and have our home there, but our team is distributed across Europe and North America. We get our fix of in-person collaboration (and croissants) in Paris each month for 3 days, always Monday-Wednesday, with an open invitation to stay the whole week. We also do longer off-sites once a year.

Our team is a multidisciplinary blend of research, engineering, and business experts. What unites us is our deep care for what we build together. We're in a race that requires hard work, intellectual curiosity, and obsession; to balance this intensity, we've assembled a team of low ego and kind-hearted individuals who have built the special culture Poolside has. By building collaboratively and with intention, we create a compounding effect that moves the entire company forward towards our mission: reaching AGI through intelligence systems built for software development.

## ABOUT THE ROLE

You'll build a new team from the ground up, owning multimodality at Poolside: teaching our frontier coding model to see. Multimodality is becoming increasingly important in frontier models, and this is a chance to shape this capability in Poolside’s models from an early stage. To deliver it, you'll draw on our powerful model factory, thousands of GPUs, and our strong research team.

The near-term focus is image input — the capability most useful to SWE and general agents — reading a design and speccing it out, writing and verifying the code that makes that design real, understanding the plots and diagrams in a paper. You'll set the technical direction, starting with pragmatic adapter-based approaches and evolving toward native multimodality over time. You'll partner closely with across teams inside Applied Research, and work in a newly-formed team alongside one of our talented founding engineers to bootstrap our multimodality efforts.

## YOUR MISSION

To bring multimodality to Poolside's models, starting with image input and building toward native multimodal understanding.

## RESPONSIBILITIES

- Own Poolside's multimodality direction and capability adoption
- Ship our first image-input capabilities
- Chart and drive the path from adapter-based to native multimodality
- Collaborate on custom evaluations and datasets for multimodal SWE capabilities
- Run experiments end to end: hypothesis, implementation, training at scale, analysis
- Partner with evals, architecture, data, and post-training teams to land multimodality in Poolside models

## SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

- Experience in end-to-end training of production-grade VLMs
- Strong LLM training fundamentals: transformers and distributed training at scale
- Strong Python programming skills
- Pragmatic and high-ownership: you reach for the simplest thing that works and thrive in greenfield ambiguity

Nice to have:

- Leadership and 0-1 experience, especially with substantial breadth, ownership, and hands-on contributions
- Distinguished research background on VLMs or multimodal models
- Understanding of the challenges of native multimodality
- Experience building agentic computer use systems

## PROCESS

- Intro call with one of our Co-Heads of Applied Research
- Technical Interviews with Founding Engineers and Members of Engineering
- Team fit call with the People team
- Final interview with our Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Eiso

## BENEFITS

- Fully remote work & flexible hours
- 37 days/year of vacation & holidays
- Health insurance allowance for you & dependents
- 16 weeks of flexible, full-pay parental leave
- Well-being, always-be-learning & home office allowances
- Company-provided equipment
- Frequent team get togethers
- Diverse & inclusive people-first culture

## About Poolside

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Poolside builds frontier AI foundation models and agentic systems for enterprise software engineering, deployed entirely within customer infrastructure.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $626M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Jason Warner (CEO & Co-founder), Eiso Kant (Co-CEO & Co-founder, CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Artificial intelligence, enterprise software development
- **Target customers**: Large enterprises, government agencies, and organizations with complex, high-consequence software environments (multi-cloud, legacy systems, air-gapped networks)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “For artificial general intelligence to drive abundance for humanity” – starting with software engineering as the strategic beachhead.

## Products & Services
- **Poolside Assistant**: Agent-based code assistance integrated into VS Code, Visual Studio, or any IDE supporting the Agent Client Protocol (ACP). Capable of planning, refactoring, testing, and incident analysis within the developer’s environment.
- **Poolside Chat**: Browser-based chat interface for code-related questions and agent interactions outside the IDE.
- **Poolside Agent CLI (`pool`)**: Command-line tool to run and manage agents in headless environments (CI/CD pipelines, automation workflows).
- **Poolside Console**: Browser-based administrative interface for governance, metrics, and system management.
- **APIs**: Programmatic access to integrate Poolside models, agents, and knowledge connectors into custom tools and automation.
- **Foundation Models**: Custom models trained using reinforcement learning from code execution feedback, optimized for long-horizon software tasks.
- **Data & Knowledge Connectors**: Integration with repositories, databases, data warehouses, and private corpora within strict security boundaries.
- **Forward Deployed Research Engineers (FDRE)**: Embedded experts who help customers design, build, and operate AI systems on-site.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $626 million as of October 2024, including a $500M Series B led by 19 investors [poolside.ai](https://www.poolside.ai/)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Series A led by Felicis, Xavier Niel, and others; Series B participants include 19 investors. Seed round led by Redpoint. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/poolsideai)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 89.1% year-over-year to 165 employees; 19 active job postings (up 171% year-over-year). Operates across 20 countries. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/poolsideai)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Security-first deployment**: Models run entirely within the customer’s VPC or on-premises, ensuring code and data never leave the customer’s control. Role-based access control for humans and agents by default. [poolside.ai](https://www.poolside.ai/)
- **Enterprise governance**: Auditability, policy enforcement, and traceability aligned to enterprise review boards and CISO requirements.
- **Outcome ownership model**: Poolside takes joint responsibility for adoption and business impact, rather than simply handing off models.
- **Specialization in high-consequence software**: Battle-tested in the toughest environments (defense, regulated industries), with a focus on long-horizon reasoning and multi-step planning.

## Strategic Focus
- **AGI through software**: The company believes the fastest path to human-level intelligence runs through mastering software engineering, then expanding to other domains.
- **Agentic organizations**: Helping enterprises become “agentic organizations” by embedding AI agents across the development lifecycle.
- **Continued model scaling**: Investing in foundation model research (pre-training, post-training, reinforcement learning) and infrastructure.
- **Global talent acquisition**: Growing a distributed workforce with hubs in the US, UK, France, Netherlands, and other European countries.

## Why Work Here
- **High employee satisfaction**: 5.0/5.0 rating on LinkedIn (based on 1 review) across work-life balance, compensation, culture, and career growth. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/poolsideai)
- **Cutting-edge research**: Work alongside world-class talent at a frontier AI lab, solving the hardest problems in software engineering.
- **Hybrid/remote flexibility**: The company operates across 20 countries, suggesting a distributed-first approach with regional hubs.
- **Growth trajectory**: 89% headcount growth in the past year, with active hiring across engineering (agent harness, pre-training, reinforcement learning, design engineering) and support engineering roles.
- **Impactful mission**: Directly contribute to the development of AGI for abundance, starting with transformative enterprise software.

## Sources
1. [poolside.ai](https://www.poolside.ai/)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/poolsideai)
3. [docs.poolside.ai](https://docs.poolside.ai/get-started/overview)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/poolside)

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