Applied Research Engineer

About Us

Sieve is a video intelligence company. Video makes up 80% of internet traffic and has become the core component to some of the most consequential industries in the world. Its impact is only accelerating due to AI — think AI-native creative & filmmaking tools, new social & communication mediums, robot systems, open-world video games, and AR/VR glasses.

We build novel video understanding systems with a level of quality and efficiency that empowers developers and enables us to partner with leading video AI model labs to collect, curate, and annotate the highest quality video datasets in the world at internet-scale.

We’ve scaled to millions in recurring revenue as a relatively small team of 11 people, growing 25% month over month. We’re a Series A company and have raised from top-tier firms such as Matrix Partners, Swift Ventures, Y Combinator, and AI Grant. Our customers include many of the leading AI video labs you probably have used or know by name.

About the Role

As an applied research engineer at Sieve, you’ll build high performance building blocks and large scale pipelines to understand video with high precision at internet scale. Often this involves working on ambiguous research problems and finding clever techniques to solve them.

You’re likely a good fit if you’re comfortable working with models + APIs and squeezing every drop of performance out of them through clever pre/post-processing, parallelism, pipelining, inference optimization, and occasionally fine-tuning.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience in computer vision or audio processing

• Strong Python developer with hands-on experience in PyTorch or similar ML frameworks

• Excellent communication skills, especially with customers and external teams

• Writes clean, maintainable code—bonus points for active GitHub or portfolio projects

• Deep passion for the video domain and media technologies

• Motivated by building end-to-end products—not just training models

• Bonus: Active contributor to open source projects

• Bonus: Experience as an early hire at a startup

• In-person at our SF HQ