NLP Engineer

Founding NLP Engineer – Confidential AI Architecture Company: Confidential | Patent-Pending System Location: Remote-first (SF / NY / LA optional) Type: Full-Time | Founding Role Compensation: Equity-based at this stage – substantial long-term upside Contact: Founder@whitebeltstudio.com About the Role: We’re building a proprietary AI system from first principles, modular, interpretable, and deeply original. This is not prompt engineering. Not model-wrapping. You’ll be working on core AI behavior, designing structured components that operate precisely and independently inside a novel architecture. Every part you build will become IP. You’ll collaborate directly with the founder to shape a system focused on clarity, performance, and generalization, not convenience. Your Responsibilities: • Train and refine transformer-based model components (e.g., RoBERTa, DeBERTa) • Design high-accuracy token-level classification heads for structured tasks • Build out custom evaluation pipelines and modular feedback loops • Work with both internal and public datasets (e.g., UD, OntoNotes) • Optimize data strategies: rare label handling, sampling, augmentation • Build components that integrate into a larger structured system Ideal Candidate Profile: You’re an AI builder, not just a researcher. You know how to get under the hood of a transformer. You understand sequence labeling and want to build clean, accurate components, not throw everything at a monolith and hope. You likely bring: • 3+ years of experience with transformer-based architectures • Expertise in PyTorch, HuggingFace, and token classification tasks • Experience debugging tokenization errors, class imbalance, label noise • Preference for modular systems over end-to-end pipelines • Ability to build models that explain themselves not just perform Bonus experience: • Working with multi-head or cascaded model designs • Benchmarking against structured NLP datasets • Prior work involving emotion, tone, or symbolic+neural systems • Experience at a 0→1 AI project or research-first startup Why Join: • Be part of a confidential, IP-protected project at the ground level • Work directly with the founder on core system design • Influence not just model behavior—but the entire system paradigm • Build something meant to last: not a feature sprint, but a foundation • Significant equity ownership in a patent-pending, high-leverage system How To Apply: Send a short note about your background and interest, plus any relevant work (GitHub, papers, projects) to: Founder@whitebeltstudio.com