Principal Machine Learning Engineer

BILT • Grapevine, TX

10d • Onsite

About The Position

BILT is building the future of spatial instruction—transforming how people learn to assemble, install, and repair the physical world. We sit at the intersection of AI and spatial computing, with a unique dataset of rich 3D instructional content that positions us to lead in multimodal understanding and generation. We're looking for a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to be a foundational technical leader on our AI team. This is not a role where you'll fine-tune some models and call it a day. You'll be tackling open research questions, exploring novel architectures, and building systems that don't have established playbooks. You'll work at the frontier of multimodal AI—bridging language, vision, and spatial understanding in ways that haven't been done before. If you thrive in ambiguity and want to shape the technical direction of an AI team from the ground up, this is your role.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in machine learning, with a track record of shipping complex systems to production
• Deep expertise in modern deep learning frameworks (PyTorch strongly preferred)
• Experience with LLMs, multimodal models, or related areas—not just fine-tuning, but understanding architectures deeply enough to extend and adapt them
• Comfort with research-oriented work: reading papers, prototyping novel approaches, and navigating problems without clear solutions
• Strong software engineering foundations—you write clean, maintainable, production-quality code
• Ability to work autonomously and drive projects from ambiguous problem statements to working systems

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Vision-Language Models, VLA architectures, or embodied AI
• Background in 3D understanding, CAD, spatial reasoning, computer graphics, or geometric deep learning
• Expertise in model optimization, efficient inference, and deployment at scale
• Publications, open-source contributions, or demonstrated research impact
• Experience as a technical lead or foundational engineer at a high-growth startup

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical anchor for the AI team, driving architectural decisions and setting the standard for engineering excellence
• Tackle ambiguous, research-oriented problems—from initial exploration through production deployment
• Design and build novel ML systems spanning multimodal understanding, generation, and spatial reasoning
• Fine-tune, adapt, and extend foundation models to our unique domain, developing robust evaluation frameworks and training pipelines
• Own critical infrastructure including training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and model serving
• Mentor and elevate other engineers through technical guidance, code review, and knowledge sharing
• Partner closely with the Director of AI and CTO to shape technical strategy and roadmap
• Stay current with the rapidly evolving AI landscape and identify opportunities to apply emerging techniques

What This Job Offers

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