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Founding AI / ML Engineer - Known

Founding AI / ML Engineer - Known

Pear VCSan Francisco, CA, United States
10 hours ago
Job type
  • Full-time
Job description

About the Role

You'll be the technical founder driving the machine learning and AI backbone behind Known - an intelligent, compatibility-driven dating platform that blends psychology, data, and human-like conversation. You'll design and ship the systems that make Known feel magical : personalized matching algorithms, adaptive recommendation loops, and natural voice / LLM-based interactions that help users connect meaningfully.

You'll work closely with the founding team (product, platform, and design) to shape both the data and ML foundations and the user-facing experiences that differentiate Known. This is a hands-on role with ownership across research, prototyping, and production deployment.

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement multi-stage matching systems (embedding-based retrieval + LLM re-ranking) for compatibility scoring, search, and personalization.
  • Develop and maintain ML pipelines for data ingestion, feature generation, model training, evaluation, and inference.
  • Prototype and productionize agentic workflows for natural-language and voice interactions (e.g., AI-assisted intake interviews, voice matching, or conversation agents).
  • Deploy and monitor ML models in production with guardrails for performance, fairness, and safety.
  • Run offline & online experiments (A / B and multivariate) to measure real-world outcomes such as engagement, match success rate, and conversation quality.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with platform engineers and product designers to integrate AI seamlessly into the Known user experience.

Requirements

  • 3+ years in applied ML or data science engineering roles, ideally working on recommendation, search, or personalization systems.
  • Strong proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, Hugging Face).
  • Experience with LLMs, embeddings, and agentic workflows .
  • Understanding of A / B testing and human-in-the-loop system design for model evaluation in production.
  • Familiarity with ANN search systems and modern MLOps tools is a plus.
  • Reinforcement learning or preference modeling experience is a strong plus.
  • You care about building safe, fair, and human-centered AI experiences.

    • Example Projects

  • Develop a user matching system based on profile information, onboarding transcripts and engagement behavior.
  • Build a dynamic profile enrichment pipeline that integrates behavioral and linguistic features into user representations.
  • Deploy a lightweight LLM-powered voice agent for user intake and conversational matchmaking.
  • Create an evaluation harness combining offline metrics (AUC, NDCG) and online experiments (match acceptance, message rate).
  • Build model monitoring and retraining loops informed by live interaction feedback.

    • Why This Role

    This is an opportunity to define the technical DNA of a consumer AI product from day one - to architect and deploy systems that combine data science, human psychology, and generative AI . Your work will directly shape how people connect, communicate, and build relationships in an AI-assisted world.

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    Founding Ai Engineer • San Francisco, CA, United States