
Member of Technical Staff, Machine Learning at Sieve (San Francisco, CA)
Sieve· San Francisco, CA·
Role details
Job description
About Us
Sieve is a multi-modal lab curating the world's highest-quality training datasets — spanning video, audio, images, text, and 3D. We combine exabyte-scale data infrastructure and novel multimodal understanding techniques that push the frontier of foundation models. Video alone makes up 80% of internet traffic, and across modalities, data has become the enabling medium powering creativity, communication, gaming, AR/VR, and robotics. Sieve exists to solve the biggest bottleneck in the growth of these applications: high-quality training data.
We partner with top AI labs and did $XXM last quarter alone, as a team of ~30 people. We also raised our Series A from Tier 1 firms such as Matrix Partners, Swift Ventures, Y Combinator, and AI Grant.
Why Now
Sieve is one of the most capital-efficient teams in AI — roughly 30 people serving the world's leading AI labs across every major data modality. You'll join early, own problems end-to-end, and watch your work ship directly into the models defining the frontier.
About the Role
As a Machine Learning Engineer at Sieve, you'll own the entire ML lifecycle — from understanding customer problems, to designing datasets, improving models, building evaluation systems, and shipping production pipelines that deliver measurable improvements in dataset quality. You'll work directly with frontier AI labs to understand difficult data problems, then build end-to-end systems that solve them. One week you might fine-tune a multimodal model to improve recall on a difficult edge case. The next you might engineer a VLM-based QA pipeline, design a new evaluation framework, or run a large-scale filtering pipeline on millions of hours of multimodal data. We're looking for engineers who enjoy owning problems end-to-end, from understanding customer requirements through shipping production ML systems that measurably improve dataset quality.
What You'll Do
- Own model quality for customer-facing video understanding problems
- Fine-tune vision-language and multimodal foundation models for specialized tasks
- Build automated evaluation and QA pipelines using frontier models like Gemini, GPT, Claude, and open-source VLMs
- Design high-precision filtering, ranking, retrieval, and labeling systems over internet-scale video datasets
- Create datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks that continuously improve model quality
- Develop production ML pipelines spanning preprocessing, inference, post-processing, and quality validation
- Work directly with frontier AI labs to translate ambiguous requirements into scalable ML systems
- Ship improvements quickly, measure results, and iterate based on real-world performance
Requirements
- Strong Python engineer with experience building production ML systems
- Experience training, fine-tuning, or deploying modern deep learning models
- Comfortable working with PyTorch and modern foundation models
- Excellent intuition for evaluation, dataset quality, precision/recall tradeoffs, and edge cases
- Enjoys rapidly prototyping with new AI models and APIs
- Comfortable owning projects from customer problem to internal pipelines to deployed solution
- Strong communicator who enjoys working directly with customers and cross-functional teams
- Excited by video, multimodal AI, and frontier foundation models
- In-person at our SF HQ
*all roles at Sieve require you to be onsite in San Francisco 5 days per week
Why work at Sieve
- Culture: The company describes itself as "tight-knit, fast-moving, and deeply customer-oriented." It is a "research lab to the core," combining frontier research with infrastructure and customer partnership. [sieve.ai/about]
- Team: The team brings together experience from NVIDIA, Scale AI, Zoox, and Niantic, providing exposure to top-tier expertise in AI and infrastructure. [sieve.ai/about]
- Impact: Employees will be working on the critical layer of data for the next generation of AI models (generative media, robotics, agents), offering a rare position at the forefront of AI research. [ycombinator.com]
- Remote/Hybrid/Office: The company is based in San Francisco, CA.
- Open Roles: As of mid-2026, they are actively hiring for Applied Research Engineer, Distributed Systems Engineer, Product Engineer, and Software Engineer, with salary ranges listed as $150K - $300K depending on role and experience. [jobs.ashbyhq.com, ycombinator.com]