Lead AI Engineer

Backflip • San Francisco, CA

48d

About The Position

Mechanical design, the work done in CAD, is the rate-limiter for progress in the physical world. However, there are only 2-4 million people on Earth who know how to CAD. But what if hundreds of millions could? What if creating something in the real world were as easy as imagining the use case, or sketching it on paper? Backflip is building a foundation model for mechanical design: unifying the world’s scattered engineering knowledge into an intelligent, end-to-end design environment. Our goal is to enable anyone to imagine a solution and hit “print.” Founded by a second-time CEO in the same space (first company: Markforged, exited for $2.1B), Backflip combines deep industry insight with breakthrough AI research. With investor Ashish Vaswani (transformer inventor), and backed by a16z and NEA, we raised a $30M Series A and built a deeply technical, mission-driven team. We’re building the AI foundation that tomorrow’s space elevators, nanobots, and spaceships will be built in. If you’re excited to define the next generation of hard tech, come build it with us. We’re looking for a Lead AI Engineer to spearhead the development of our state-of-the-art foundation model for manufacturing and CAD. This is a leadership role at the intersection of AI, technical architecture, and company vision: a chance to shape not only our models, but the direction of AI in the physical world.

Requirements

• You’ve led and shipped at least one (ideally multiple) ML products or large models into real-world production.
• You have deep experience building large-scale multimodal or generative models (text, 3D, or visual), and are fluent in PyTorch, distributed training, and modern ML infrastructure.
• You’re comfortable thinking across architecture, data, and evaluation, and thrive in the ambiguity of solving hard problems end-to-end.
• You’ve led teams or initiatives that influenced company direction, product definition, or customer experience.
• You bring strong communication and leadership skills, with a clear sense of how technical vision connects to product and customer value.
• You care deeply about building tools that expand human capability, not just optimizing benchmarks.
• You’re inspired by the opportunity to redefine how AI reshapes manufacturing and design in the real world.

Responsibilities

• Architect and lead the development of a next-generation foundation model that integrates text, geometry, and design intelligence.
• Build and code: set the standard for technical excellence in ML engineering and model development.
• Define and own the technical roadmap for Backflip’s core model, including architecture, data, training, and evaluation strategy.
• Shape AI strategy in close collaboration with Backflip’s leadership team, ensuring the technical direction is in harmony with product and customer goals.
• Drive execution: set ambitious objectives, define milestones, and uphold a high technical bar across the team.
• Mentor and develop engineers across AI and software, fostering growth, creativity, and technical mastery.
• Collaborate deeply with customers, product, and the sales team to ground model design in real-world feedback and deliver impactful AI-powered tools.
• Ship real products. You’ve done it before, and you’ll do it again - taking models from research to production systems used by real people in the physical world.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed