Senior Applied Research Scientist - Foundation Models

Build a safer world with us, one incident at a time.

Ambient.ai is the category creator and leader in Agentic Physical Security. Powered by Ambient Pulsar, the first reasoning Vision-Language Model purpose-built for physical security, our platform seamlessly integrates with existing security cameras and physical access control systems to unify monitoring, access control, threat assessment, response, and investigations through an always-on reasoning layer that augments security operators with superhuman capabilities. The results: 95% fewer false alarms, investigations 20x faster, and 10x faster response.

The momentum speaks for itself: we doubled new ARR in FY26, and have delivered results for world-class customers including Cisco, Service Now, Sentinel One, Tik Tok, Bayer, and MoMA. That kind of momentum creates an environment where great people thrive, and it shows: we recently ranked #71 out of 500 on Forbes best startup employers list.

Founded in 2017 and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and Allegion Ventures, Ambient.ai is on a fast-paced journey to fulfill our mission: prevent every security incident possible.

Ambient.ai is hiring a Senior Applied Research Scientist to build the next generation of foundation models for computer vision. You will join a team responsible for building multimodal models with state-of-the-art performance on real-world vision benchmarks. In this role, you’ll own full-cycle model development: from pre-training and fine-tuning on image-language data to applying distillation and compression techniques for deployment. This is a hands-on, cross-functional role where your work will directly impact our mission of preventing every security incident possible.

• Develop & Optimize VLMs:
  Design and optimize transformer-based vision-language models to understand images, videos, and text, and optimize for real-time inference.
• Pre-training & Fine-tuning:
  Own the full training pipeline—from pre-training on image-text data to fine-tuning for Ambient.ai’s physical security domain and use cases.
• Model Compression & Optimization:
  Apply techniques like distillation, quantization, and pruning to reduce model size and latency, enabling efficient edge deployment.
• Leverage Open-Source & Innovate:
  Use and extend state-of-the-art open-source models. Prototype new architectures and training methods to advance Ambient.ai’s multimodal AI research.
• Cross-Team
  
  Collaboration:
  
  Work with engineering and product teams to integrate models into the platform. Iterate based on real-world feedback and deployment data to improve performance.
• Research and Experimentation:
  Stay current with vision, NLP, and multimodal AI research. Design experiments to test new algorithms and continually enhance our core AI systems.

• Ph.D. or Master's in CS, EE, or related field, with a strong foundation in AI/ML (Ph.D. preferred or Master's with strong experience)
• Proficient in Python/C++ and deep learning frameworks like PyTorch or Tensor Flow. Comfortable with large-scale training pipelines
• Hands-on experience with CNNs, Transformers, and Vision Transformers (ViT). Strong understanding of vision-language models and how to fine-tune or adapt them
• Proven skills in model training and optimization, including fine-tuning on large datasets and applying distillation, quantization, or similar techniques. Experience with foundation or multimodal models is a plus.
• Strong problem-solving ability: quick prototyping, diagnosing failure cases, and iterating on solutions
• Startup experience preferred:
  Comfortable with ambiguity, fast iteration, and owning projects end-to-end

• We are creating an entirely new category within a 120+ billion-dollar physical security industry…