Senior Machine Learning Engineer

About Vardera Labs

Vardera Labs is building the next generation of infrastructure for the art, auction, and collectibles industry—combining cutting-edge AI, computer vision, and automation to power catalog creation, data strategy, and operational excellence for auction houses worldwide. We’re a small, venture-backed team with a bold mission: to modernize a multi-billion-dollar market at a critical moment of generational ownership transfer and digital transformation.

What You’ll Do

• Build and deploy AI/ML models across new asset categories (comics, cards, watches, jewelry, fine art, etc.).
• Balance from-scratch builds with leveraging foundation models and off-the-shelf tools — using the right approach for speed, accuracy, and efficiency.
• Prototype quickly, test with real customer data, and push to production.
• Design workflows that minimize wasted effort while compounding into long-term defensible data + model infrastructure.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong background in applied ML (vision, text, multimodal, embeddings, fine-tuning).
• Pragmatic decision-maker: knows when to train, when to adapt, and when to just glue things together.
• Builder mindset — bias toward action, rapid iteration, and comfort with messy or sparse data.
• Excited to join a post-seed startup as a founding team member with broad project ownership.

Why Join

• Direct founding-level impact in a venture-backed company already working with major customers.
• Build the models that expand us to multi-category AI infrastructure.
• See your models drive real-world revenue and efficiency in a multi-trillion-dollar industry.

Compensation

• Salary level matching seed-stage hires (relative to experience and fit): $175,000 - $250,000
• Equity: Meaningful early equity in a high growth startup

Location

Hybrid with periodic in-person offsites and industry conferences. While we have a bias towards in person in Boston, it’s not required everyday, but expected you spend >50% of your time in the office.