Founding ML Engineer

Location: Detroit, MI (On-site initially with potential transition to remote)

A venture-backed sports technology startup is building a next-generation intelligence platform designed to transform how competitive football programs analyze game film. By combining advanced computer vision, large-scale data infrastructure, and machine learning, this platform aims to automate the traditionally manual process of analyzing thousands of hours of film.

The organization is assembling its founding engineering team and is seeking a Founding ML Engineer who will play a critical role in designing the data systems and machine learning workflows that power the platform. This role sits at the intersection of machine learning infrastructure, computer vision data pipelines, and scalable cloud systems. The ideal candidate thrives in a fast-moving startup environment and enjoys building foundational systems that directly influence product direction.

This Role Offers

• Competitive compensation package with meaningful founding equity opportunity.
• Direct collaboration with experienced technical leadership and product leaders.
• Opportunity to build foundational AI infrastructure from day one.
• Access to large-scale sports video datasets and real-world applications of computer vision.
• High ownership and influence over technical architecture.

Focus Areas

• Architect machine learning data pipelines that transform raw sports video into structured training data for computer vision models.
• Develop automated video ingestion systems capable of processing large volumes of high-resolution footage in a cloud environment.
• Integrate modern vision foundation models to assist with automated tagging, segmentation, and metadata generation across sports film datasets.
• Design active learning workflows that identify uncertain predictions and route them for human verification to improve model accuracy.
• Build scalable storage and processing pipelines using cloud services to manage large video libraries efficiently.
• Implement systems that synchronize multi-camera game footage using visual and audio signals.
• Establish data versioning practices that enable reproducible machine learning experiments and traceability between models and datasets.
• Develop internal tools and lightweight interfaces that allow verification teams to review and confirm AI-generated labels.
• Collaborate closely with product leaders and domain experts to ensure the platform delivers reliable and actionable insights.

Education

Bachelor’s or higher degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Work Environment

This role is initially based onsite in the Detroit, Michigan area to support close collaboration with the founding leadership team. As the engineering organization grows, the role may transition to support remote flexibility.

Skill Set

• Strong programming experience with Python and modern machine learning tooling.
• Experience building data pipelines or infrastructure supporting computer vision or machine learning workflows.
• Familiarity with video processing tools such as FFmpeg or similar frameworks.
• Experience working with cloud platforms such as AWS or Google Cloud.
• Understanding of vector databases or semantic search systems used for large datasets.
• Ability to integrate and orchestrate existing machine learning models rather than training models entirely from scratch.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including system design, testing practices, and maintainable code architecture.
• Comfort operating in an early-stage startup environment where speed and ownership are critical.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building computer vision pipelines involving object detection, pose estimation, or segmentation.
• Background working with sports analytics, large-scale video datasets, or similar multimodal data environments.
• Experience working at companies focused on AI data labeling, autonomous systems, or high-scale machine learning platforms.
• Familiarity with modern tooling for rapid internal tool development and developer productivity.

About Blue Signal:  

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