At OpenSpace, we’re redefining how the world’s most complex projects are built. Our AI-powered Visual Intelligence Platform uses computer vision and spatial AI to give construction teams a real-time view of what’s happening on-site, helping them build faster, safer, and with greater confidence.
But what truly sets us apart is our people. We hire curious, driven teammates who love solving hard problems, taking ownership, and making a real-world impact. Great people build great culture—and apparently it shows. Forbes has named OpenSpace one of America’s Best Startup Employers five years in a row. Come see what all the fuss is about ✨
The role:
The Sr. AI Research Engineer will build agentic systems that reason across the full OpenSpace data record: 360° imagery, point clouds, BIM models, drawing sets, and specifications, plus the newer streams coming off mobile capture, wearables, and field audio. Our computer vision team builds the perception primitives that determine what is in a capture. You will build the layer above, combining those primitives with frontier models to answer the questions project teams actually ask, and making the answers verifiable enough that a builder will act on them.
The work is applied research. The hard problems are deciding what an agent should see out of a four-dimensional site record, designing the tools it can call, and proving it is right often enough to ship. By the time you are calling a frontier API, the interesting decisions have already been made.
What you will be doing:
- Design and build agent systems that plan and execute multi-step tasks across imagery, geometry, and documents.
- Own the context layer. Build retrieval and grounding over a spatially and temporally indexed site record so an agent gets the evidence a question actually needs.
- Design the tool surface: the primitives an agent calls to locate a component, compare two captures, read a region of a drawing, or query a BIM element.
- Build evaluations for tasks where ground truth is ambiguous, then use them to make honest calls about what is ready and what is not.
- Choose the right model for each step. Frontier API, open-weight model, fine-tuned small model, or classical CV, weighed against cost, latency, and accuracy at production volume.
- Make outputs traceable. Every claim should point back to the pixel, sheet, or spec section that supports it.
- Prototype quickly, kill what doesn't work, and partner with platform engineers to ship what does.
What we are looking for:
- M.S./Ph.D. in a related field or equivalent industry experience.
- 5+ years building ML systems, including at least one LLM or VLM-based system you took to production and kept running. We will ask what broke.
- Experience designing evaluations from scratch where ground truth is expensive, sparse, or contested.
- Strong multimodal fluency: vision-language models, embeddings and retrieval, context design, and fine-tuning when it earns its cost.
- Solid engineering. Python, async orchestration, tracing and cost instrumentation. You build your own harness.
- Comfort with spatial data. You don't need SLAM depth, but coordinate frames, camera poses, and projections shouldn't slow you down.
- Judgment about what is worth automating, and the willingness to say when the answer is nothing yet.
Nice to have:
- Post-training or reinforcement learning on agent trajectories.
- Document understanding over technical drawings, specifications, or other structured PDFs.
- Sensor streams beyond core imagery, such as mobile capture, wearables, or field audio.
- Experience in construction, robotics, geospatial, or another domain where models meet the physical world.
Base Salary: $181,000 - $230,000 CAD
OpenSpace welcomes employees from varied backgrounds and walks of life, and it’s reflected in our diverse community. OpenSpace is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment, without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
Skills Required
- M.S. or Ph.D. in a related field, or equivalent industry experience
- 5+ years building machine learning systems
- Experience taking at least one LLM- or VLM-based system to production and maintaining it
- Experience designing evaluations where ground truth is expensive, sparse, or contested
- Strong multimodal expertise, including vision-language models, embeddings, retrieval, context design, and fine-tuning
- Strong software engineering skills with Python, asynchronous orchestration, tracing, and cost instrumentation
- Comfort working with spatial data, coordinate frames, camera poses, and projections
- Post-training or reinforcement learning on agent trajectories
- Document understanding for technical drawings, specifications, or structured PDFs
- Experience with mobile capture, wearables, field audio, or other sensor streams
- Experience in construction, robotics, geospatial, or another physical-world domain
OpenSpace Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about OpenSpace and has not been reviewed or approved by OpenSpace.
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Healthcare Strength — Benefits include fully paid core health coverage for eligible employees. Coverage spans medical, dental, and vision as part of a modern package.
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Retirement Support — Employer 401(k) matching is offered as part of the standard package. This indicates attention to long‑term financial security alongside salary.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity is provided for all full‑time roles, making ownership broadly accessible. This supports total compensation competitiveness beyond base pay.
OpenSpace Insights
What We Do
OpenSpace is on a mission to bring new levels of transparency to construction. We combine simple off-the-shelf 360° cameras, computer vision, and AI to make it incredibly easy to capture a complete visual record of a jobsite, share it via the cloud, and track progress remotely. Our customers have used the platform to capture over four billion square feet of active construction projects around the world. OpenSpace is based in San Francisco, California.
