Machine Learning Engineer

  • Vardera
  • Boston, Massachusetts
  • 04/02/2026
Full time Information Technology Telecommunications

Job Description

About Vardera Labs

At Vardera, we're 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 are a small, venture backed team of operators and entrepreneurs 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 toward in person in Boston, it's not required everyday, but we expect you spend >50% of your time in the office.