---
title: 'Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Sensors & Intelligence at Tonal'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-machine-learning-engineer-sensors-intelligence-tonal-toronto-wfktpxbgbnjz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-06'
---

# Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Sensors & Intelligence at Tonal

- **Company:** Tonal
- **Location:** Toronto, Canada
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-11-02
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tonal/7a5daa82-41eb-4a03-8e4f-49e47825d4d6

## Job description

## Overview

Tonal is looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join our Sensors & Intelligence team and help build foundation models of human movement and physiology. You'll work where machine learning, biomechanics, physiology, and computer vision meet. You'll have access to the largest strength training dataset in the world: millions of workouts captured through cable force and position sensors, cameras, and wearable trackers.

Your job is to turn that multimodal data into general-purpose representations of how people move, exert effort, fatigue, and adapt over time. Those representations will power the next generation of Tonal's intelligence: adaptive coaching, form feedback, personalized progression, and advanced musculoskeletal health models. This role combines foundational research with work that reaches our members, and you'll help shape that balance as the team grows. You'll contribute to defining ML research directions, run rigorous experiments, and publish your work, while partnering with engineering to bring breakthroughs into the product.

This role is remote-first, based in Toronto, Ontario. We are open to candidates based in Canada and the US.

## What You Will Do

- Lead research and development of multimodal foundation models that learn from synchronized sensor, video, and physiological signals
- Design self-supervised pretraining strategies for long, heterogeneous time series data
- Develop sensor fusion approaches that handle different sampling rates, sensor noise, synchronization error, and missing modalities
- Advance computer vision methods for 2D and 3D human pose estimation, motion reconstruction, and movement quality assessment
- Build models that estimate biomechanical and physiological quantities such as joint kinematics, load, effort, fatigue, and recovery
- Define evaluation frameworks and benchmarks that measure how well models generalize across users, body types, movements, and equipment conditions
- Validate model outputs against gold-standard references such as motion capture, force plates, and clinical-grade physiological sensors
- Work with ML Engineering to adapt research models for cloud deployment and on-device inference
- Publish regularly at top venues and represent Tonal in the research community through papers, talks, and collaborations
- Mentor scientists and engineers and help set the scientific direction of the Sensors & Intelligence team

## Who You Are

- A proven independent researcher with a strong track record of publications in relevant venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, IMWUT/UbiComp, CHI, IEEE TBME, J. Biomechanics, or similar)
- PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Biomechanics, or a related field strongly preferred; we also welcome candidates whose research experience and publication record demonstrate equivalent depth
- Deep expertise in at least one of the following: sensor fusion, biomechanics, physiological signal modeling, or computer vision for human motion
- Hands-on experience designing, training, and debugging transformer architectures, including attention mechanisms, positional encoding for time series, and multimodal tokenization
- Proven ability to train and develop ML models end to end in PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow, from data curation through experimentation and analysis
- Strong grounding in signal processing, including filtering, calibration, time alignment, and frequency-domain analysis
- Rigorous experimental design: you know how to build ablations, avoid leakage across subjects, and tell real gains from noise
- Ability to independently define and drive ambiguous research problems toward measurable product impact
- Clear communicator who can explain complex findings to scientists, engineers, and product leaders

Extra Credit

- Experience pretraining or scaling foundation models, including distributed training and an understanding of scaling behavior
- Familiarity with musculoskeletal modeling tools (e.g., OpenSim, MuJoCo, MyoSim) or physics-informed ML
- Experience with wearable physiological signals such as IMU, PPG, HRV, or EMG data
- Experience with personalization, few-shot adaptation, or uncertainty quantification
- Experience with model compression or efficient architectures for edge deployment
- Background in human subjects research, data collection protocols, or validation studies
- Interest in fitness, sports science, or digital health

At Tonal, we believe that the unique and varied lived experiences of our teammates contribute to our overall strength. At Tonal, we believe that the unique and varied lived experiences of our teammates contribute to our overall strength. We don’t just appreciate differences, we celebrate them, and we always seek people that represent a wide variety of backgrounds. We’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and designing employee experiences that contribute to your growth as much as you do to ours. If your experience aligns with what we’re looking for (even if you don’t check every single box), send us your application. We would love to hear from you!

Tonal is committed to meeting the diverse needs of people with disabilities in a timely manner that is consistent with the principles of independence, dignity, integration, and equality of opportunity. Should you have any accommodation requests, please reach out to us via our confidential email, accessibility@tonal.com. All requests will be addressed and responded to in accordance with Tonal’s Accessibility Policy and local legislation.

## About Tonal

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Tonal develops a smart home gym system that uses digital resistance, electromagnets, and AI to provide personalized strength training.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Venture Capital-backed; Series F completed in 2023; latest debt round in March 2026)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Aly Orady (Founder & Advisor; former CEO and CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Smart fitness equipment / Recreational goods (connected home gym hardware & subscription software)
- **Target customers**: B2C – individuals and households seeking home strength training
- **Mission / purpose statement**: “Help everyone find their inner strength” and “make strength training accessible to all”

## Products & Services
- **Tonal Smart Home Gym**: A wall-mounted unit with digital weight resistance (up to 200+ lbs), touchscreen display, sensors, and AI-powered coaching. Replaces free weights, barbells, and cable machines.
- **Tonal Membership**: $59.95/month (12-month commitment) – includes personalized workout programs, automatic weight adjustment, advanced lifting modes (e.g., Drop Sets), form feedback, progress tracking, and unlimited user profiles per household.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed. Post-money valuation from earlier rounds is unknown; the latest round (Debt – $20M in March 2026) carries no valuation.
- **Key Metric (Private)**: Total funding raised ≈ **$678M** as of March 2026 (includes Series A through Series F and debt).
- **Notable Investors**: L Catterton (operating partner Todd Bartee joined as CEO), Sapphire Ventures, Team Builder Ventures, NextEquity Partners, Skip Capital, Big Loud Capital, and over 55 total investors.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - New CEO Todd Bartee (Feb 2026) brings scaling expertise from L Catterton portfolio companies.
  - New CFO Hayden Tollas (Sept 2025) from Gap Inc. / Old Navy.
  - Debt financing of $20M in March 2026 indicates continued capital to support operations or growth.
  - Headcount of ~393 employees (as of mid-2026).
  - Active patent filings (e.g., drop set mode, form feedback, reserve estimates).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Digital resistance technology**: Uses electromagnets and real-time algorithms to adjust weight in 1‑lb increments, eliminating physical plates and racks.
- **AI‑driven personalization**: Automatically learns user strength and recommends adjustments; advanced modes (e.g., drop sets) that would require manual intervention in traditional gyms.
- **Compact, all-in-one design**: Fits in a home environment while delivering a full strength-training gym experience.
- **Proprietary IP**: Dozens of active patents covering digital exercise devices, form feedback, and resistance control.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling the consumer brand**: New CEO Todd Bartee aims to drive profitable growth and expand market reach, leveraging his DTC and consumer goods experience.
- **Product & content innovation**: Continued investment in software features (form feedback, new lifting modes) and content (workout programs, coaching).
- **Financial discipline**: Bringing in a CFO with retail/omni-channel background suggests focus on unit economics, profitability, and possible retail expansion.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven culture**: “Tight-knit group of builders, thinkers, coaches, creators” dedicated to transforming fitness.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office presence in San Francisco HQ, New York Studio, and Toronto office. Bi-weekly catered team lunches, stocked kitchens, and a Tonal loaner program for employees.
- **Benefits**: Competitive salary, top-tier health care, commuter benefits, parental leave, mental health support, retirement savings, flexible time off, and Tonal discounts for employees and their families.
- **Inclusive atmosphere**: Emphasis on diversity and belonging; “welcome talented people with unique perspectives.”
- **Engineering & product focus**: Opportunities across hardware, software, data, and content teams; exposure to cutting-edge AI/ML and IoT.

## Sources
1. [tonal.com](https://tonal.com/pages/about) – Company overview, leadership, mission
2. [tonal.com](https://tonal.com/pages/careers) – Culture, perks, benefits
3. [pitchbook.com](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/125615-62) – Funding history, headcount, investor list
4. [tonal.com](https://tonal.com/) – Product details, membership pricing
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tonal) – Current job openings

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