Aicadium's Applied Research team is looking for a senior computer vision / ML scientist to tackle open-world visual understanding with limited labels across 2D recognition, multimodal inspection, and 3D/4D perception. You will bring anomaly detection, zero- and few-shot recognition, and semantic segmentation to applied systems used across multiple industries, building on 2D and 3D vision foundation models and vision-language models (VLMs). You will also help shape the team's research roadmap, with a focus on 3D/4D reconstruction, spatial perception, and world models. This is a hybrid role based in San Diego, where our U.S. headquarters is located. The ideal candidate has deep hands-on experience in modern computer vision, has taken models beyond the prototype stage, and can own problems end-to-end while supporting the development of junior scientists.
Responsibilities:
- Own applied research on vision problems (anomaly detection, zero- and few-shot recognition, and semantic segmentation) end-to-end, from problem framing and baselines through validated models.
- Adapt and extend 2D and 3D vision foundation models and VLMs to industrial domains through fine-tuning, harness optimization, and distillation.
- Develop multimodal (vision-language) methods for industrial inspection tasks.
- Conduct applied research in 3D/4D reconstruction, spatial perception, world models, and physics-based simulations, from proof-of-concept prototypes to reusable internal capabilities.
- Design data and evaluation strategy for low-label, long-tail settings: annotation plans, active learning, and evaluation protocols that translate to stronger performance in the field.
- Systematically analyze and improve deployed vision systems. Collaborate with engineering and product teams to bring new models to production, and maintain and improve model quality after launch.
- Provide technical guidance to junior scientists and communicate methods, results, and trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Skills & Requirements:
- PhD or Master's in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related field with 4+ years of hands-on computer vision / ML experience; doctoral research counts toward this requirement.
- Expertise in at least two of the following: anomaly detection, zero- and few-shot (open-vocabulary) recognition, semantic segmentation, or multimodal (vision-language) learning.
- Experience adapting vision foundation models (e.g., DINOv3, JEPA-family models
, SAM series) and VLMs (e.g., the Qwen-VL series) to new domains.
- Hands-on experience in 3D/4D reconstruction and spatial perception, including modern 3D foundation models (e.g., VGGT, MASt3R, Depth Anything 3), grounded in multi-view geometry and camera models.
- Ability to independently define research problems and turn recent research into working prototypes, with rigorous experimental practice: strong baselines, ablations, and sound evaluation on real-world data, including rare-event and heavily imbalanced problems.
- Strong proficiency in Python and PyTorch, with a solid foundation in applied mathematics (linear algebra, geometry, probability, statistics, optimization).
- Clear written and verbal communication skills, including presenting research to technical and non-technical audiences and stakeholders.
Nice to Have:
- Publications at top-tier venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR) or notable open-source contributions in related areas.
- Experience bringing computer vision models from prototype to production or customer-facing deployment.
- Experience generating synthetic training data with generative models or simulation, particularly for defects, anomalies, and rare or data-deficient scenarios and classes.
- Domain experience in industrial inspection, manufacturing, aerospace, food processing, medical imaging, or other fields with similar rare-defect or visual verification problems.
- Experience with world models, such as V-JEPA 2, NVIDIA Cosmos, or spatially grounded VLMs.
Experience with VLAs and transformer-based action planners.
About Us:
Aicadium is a global technology company delivering AI-powered industrial computer vision products into the hands of enterprises. With offices in Singapore and San Diego, California, and an international team of data scientists, engineers, and business strategists, Aicadium is operationalizing AI within organizations where advanced machine learning innovations were previously out of reach.
Team
Join a growing team of data scientists, machine learning, and software engineers in an agile development environment. Work together with some of the best in the field to tackle challenging projects and operationalize the solutions you develop across a variety of industries and use cases.
Culture
We work in a casual and collaborative startup environment. Every member of the team plays a key role in shaping the solutions we develop and creating positive business value for the companies we work with. We are building a hub of the best talent in San Diego, CA, but we are open to working with people all over the U.S.
Benefits
Aicadium has a great benefits package to come with your salary. Benefits include PTO, health, vision, and dental insurance, life and AD&D, 401k with matching, and more!
Netherlands