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.
Top Skills
What We Do
Vardera is the intelligence layer for collectible commerce. We build AI infrastructure that identifies, grades, authenticates, and values collectibles from a single image. Our category-specific computer vision models transform subjective, expert-driven workflows into structured, machine-readable intelligence. Marketplaces, auction houses, insurers, and dealers use Vardera to reduce fraud, accelerate intake, improve listing quality, and unlock pricing transparency across coins, trading cards, comics, and other high-value collectibles. One API. Expert-level outputs. At scale. We're a venture-backed team building foundational infrastructure for a defining moment: as $8+ trillion in hard assets transfers between generations and industries that have relied on offline expertise for centuries finally go digital.
Why Work With Us
Greenfield AI at the ground floor. You're not patching legacy systems—you're architecting from scratch. Small team means your code ships and matters. We're defining how an entire industry operates, not competing in a crowded market. Early-stage impact, interesting problems, real ownership.
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