AI Engineer, Computer Vision at Mill in San Bruno, CA

Mill is a waste prevention technology company reimagining what it means to eliminate waste, starting with food. We build smart systems and infrastructure for homes, businesses, and municipalities that transform food scraps from landfill-bound waste into valuable resources, including chicken feed. Tens of thousands of Mill’s residential food recyclers are already helping households divert millions of pounds of food scraps every year, paving the way for our upcoming launch of Mill Commercial—the industry’s first end-to-end solution for managing, understanding, and preventing food waste in commercial environments (e.g. grocery, restaurants, food services). At Mill, we are passionate about building easy-to-use, beautifully designed technologies that keep food in the food system and out of landfills. About the Role We're hiring an AI Engineer to work on the AI core of Mill Commercial — the computer vision and agentic systems that turn a stream of food waste into operational intelligence for commercial kitchens. Mill Commercial integrates a camera and onboard compute directly into our high-capacity food recycler; models running on the edge identify, classify, and quantify food scraps at the point of generation, and our vision pipeline turns that signal into procurement and operational guidance for large food service operators. You'll join a small AI team, building the data and training pipeline that produces our edge CV models, designing the cloud-side evaluation that tells us whether those models are good enough to ship, and helping build the agentic, LLM-driven product features that turn raw waste data into customer-facing insights and recommendations. This is a hands-on senior IC role for someone who's equally comfortable fine-tuning a segmentation model, prompting a VLM, and wiring an agent into a product feature. What You'll Do Build and manage the end-to-end ML training pipeline: data ingestion from deployed kitchen units, ground truth generation, annotation tooling (including foundation-model-assisted labeling), training, evaluation, and retraining cycles. Train and evaluate segmentation, classification, and mass-estimation models for the Mill Commercial camera pipeline — from prompting foundation models to fine-tuning ConvNets and VLMs. Build the cloud-side evaluation harness that tells us how our shipped edge models are actually performing in the field — automated, reproducible, and aligned to product accuracy targets across food types, kitchen environments, and deployment configurations. Own MLOps: reproducible training, experiment tracking, model versioning, and automated evaluation against product-defined accuracy targets. Export and validate models for deployment to edge devices, working closely with the edge team on optimization, quantization, and integration. Help design and build the LLM- and agent-powered product features that consume waste characterization data and turn it into customer-facing recommendations — purchasing suggestions, anomaly explanations, operational nudges. Define how agents call tools, ground in customer data, and stay reliable in production. Analyze failure cases systematically — unfamiliar food classes, novel kitchen environments, challenging lighting and clutter conditions — and drive the data and modeling decisions that close accuracy gaps. What We're Looking For Strong fundamentals in computer vision and deep learning — segmentation, detection, classification, tracking. You understand the architectures well enough to make informed choices. Fluency with modern ML approaches — VLMs, LLMs, foundation models, and agentic systems — alongside classical deep learning. You know when to fine-tune a ConvNet, when to prompt a VLM, and when to wire up an agent, and you understand the practical realities of putting any of them into a product. Experience building ML training pipelines and data annotation systems at scale. Experience evaluating ML models rigorously — designing metrics, building the eval harness, and using results to drive product decisions rather than just publish a number. Proficiency with cloud ML infrastructure (AWS or equivalent) — you've managed training jobs, data pipelines, and experiment workflows in production. Familiarity with cloud-to-edge model deployment. Clear, direct communication — you can explain tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders, push back honestly when you disagree, and write docs that others can follow. Genuine interest in applying AI to food waste reduction and sustainability. This is a mission-driven product and we want people who care about the mission. Software skills: Python, PyTorch, OpenCV. Strong familiarity with MLOps on AWS infrastructure. Experience with LLM and agent frameworks. Google Cloud / Gemini experience is a plus. Nice to Have Experience with video understanding (temporal consistency, tracking, video segmentation) Experience with foundation models for data annotation Experience with MLOps tooling (Weights & Biases, MLflow, SageMaker, or equivalents) Experience shipping LLM- or agent-powered features in a consumer or B2B product Hardware / IoT product experience, particularly with computer vision and cameras for embedded systems The estimated base salary range for this position is $240 to $280k, which does not include the value of benefits or a potential equity grant. A wide range of factors are considered in making compensation decisions, including but not limited to skill sets, market conditions, experience and training, licensure and certifications, and business and organizational needs. At Mill, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role.