Lead AI Engineer

About this role

Company Description

Dallas Venture Capital is leading this search on behalf of one of our portfolio companies, a stealth-mode startup redefining network security. The company is co-backed by Khosla Ventures. The perimeter model was built for a world that no longer exists. Threats move faster than rules can be written, and signal volume far exceeds what any human team can process. The company is building an AI-native security platform from the ground up rather than layering AI onto legacy tooling. The founding team consists of repeat operators who have built and exited two prior security companies together, with deep backgrounds in real-time analytics, large-scale data infrastructure, and security engineering.

Role Description

The Lead AI Engineer will design, build, fine-tune, and deploy the AI/ML systems at the core of the product. The focus is on Small Language Models (SLMs) and domain-specific models for security use cases including threat detection, anomaly detection, traffic classification, policy automation, and risk scoring. This is a hands-on technical leadership role working directly with the founders and the engineering, product, and security teams.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on experience in AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and NLP.
• Experience creating, fine-tuning, evaluating, and deploying SLMs or domain-specific models.
• Strong Python skills with frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, or scikit-learn.
• Experience with model fine-tuning, distillation, embeddings, RAG, and inference optimization.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Familiarity with MLOps, model monitoring, data pipelines, and vector databases.
• Strong communication, problem-solving, and technical leadership skills.
• Cybersecurity, network security, or security analytics experience strongly preferred.
• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI, ML, Data Science, or a related field preferred.

Responsibilities

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