Machine Learning Engineer - Multimodal Modeling

Job description

Why Join Stand https://www.standinsurance.com/careers/why-stand/: At Stand, you’ll help build a new class of global property protection. We use advanced physics and AI to model catastrophic risk at the asset level, then automate underwriting and mitigation before loss occurs. Insurance is simply the current delivery mechanism. The real product is a scalable risk engine, our Stand World Model https://frontier.standinsurance.com. We stay when traditional insurers exit. We model what others approximate. And we build systems that change outcomes, not just prices. Our leadership team https://www.standinsurance.com/vision includes former successful founders and CEOs from Metromile, PolicyGenius, WePay, and HotelTonight, bringing deep experience in building and scaling high-growth companies. Background: The property insurance industry is built to price loss after it happens. It relies on coarse proxies, backward-looking data, and manual processes, then accepts damage as unavoidable. Stand takes a different approach. We simulate how real-world catastrophes affect individual properties, translate that into actionable decisions, and automate the business around it. The result is a platform that can underwrite what others can’t and operate with far less friction. Role Summary: As a Machine Learning Engineer on the Applied Science team, you will design, train, and deploy Stand's flagship AI capabilities, with a central focus on the multimodal meshing of our Stand World Model with powerful language models. This work brings physical simulation, rich 3D representations of real assets, and broader business context together into models that can reason across all of them at once, in support of better underwriting, pricing, and mitigation decisions. This is a hands-on, high-ownership position on the Machine Learning team within Stand Applied Science. You will own modeling work end-to-end, from architecture and training strategy through evaluation and production deployment, and partner closely with the Platform team to ensure the agentic harness and workflows your models plug into deliver strong results in production. Your partnerships will extend across the business, mirroring the breadth of the model's inputs: collecting technical insight from subject matter experts and other MLEs, and institutional judgment from underwriting, pricing, mitigation, inspection, and customer decision-making. Key initiatives include: - Designing and training multimodal model architectures that jointly reason over physical, spatial, and business-context data - Building frameworks that let these models act as agents within nuanced workflows, making complex tool calls that include interacting with our world-modeling stack - Developing retrieval and similarity capabilities over learned representations of real-world assets and their multi-layered complexities - Standing up the training-data pipelines, evaluation harnesses, and production monitoring that take these models from prototype to production, collaborating closely with Applied Science infrastructure engineers to build out proper tooling What You'll Do: - Design, build, and deploy machine learning systems spanning multimodal learning, physics-informed AI, digital twins, and spatial intelligence, contributing directly to core business impact - Own projects end-to-end, from problem definition and prototyping through production deployment, adoption, and ongoing performance monitoring - Develop rigorous evaluation frameworks that weigh model judgments against real business outcomes - Build on and extend scalable ML infrastructure - Partner with Stand’s Platform team on the model-harness interface - Drive cross-functional alignment, communicating decisions, tradeoffs, and status Core Skills (Must-Haves): - Deep hands-on experience designing and training multimodal models, fusing heterogeneous data (e.g., 3D/vision, simulation outputs, tabular, and text) into shared representations; strong VLM exposure - Experience building and post-training multi-step LLM agents that call external tools and interact with environments, including evaluating if a trajectory reflects appropriate judgment and user constraints - A record of bringing models of this class to production: training at scale, evaluation, deployment, and iteration on live systems - Experience applying ML to complex physical systems. We are agnostic to the domain: atmospheric, molecular, protein, robotics, fluid dynamics, or other physics-grounded modeling all carries over - Strong project ownership and execution: planning, prioritization, and delivery of complex technical work - Ability to operate across disciplines, connecting technical development to business objectives - Strong, succinct communication and judgment to balance R&D, delivery timelines, and business impact - Highly self-motivated, proactive, and adaptable; comfortable in fast-paced, ambiguous environments Nice to Haves: - Experience with embodied AI— training agents to navigate in 3D environments - Experience with retrieval and embedding systems: vector search and similarity in latent space - Experience with geometric deep learning: point clouds, meshes, and spatially-aware architectures - Familiarity with physics-informed AI and surrogate modeling across a number of domains - Experience in startups or zero-to-one technology development - Knowledge of geospatial, remote sensing, or Earth observation datasets Compensation: The annual base salary range for full-time employees in this position is $250,000 to $295,000 + meaningful Equity Grant. Compensation decisions are dependent on several factors including, but not limited to, an individual’s qualifications, location where the role is to be performed, internal equity, and alignment with market data. Benefits: - Above-market Health, Dental, and Vision coverage - Weekly lunch stipend - Flexible time off + holidays - 401(k) plan - Commuter benefits - PAT & MAT Leave - Short-Term and Long-Term Disability - Monthly team gatherings - In-office perks AI in the Interview Process Thoughtful use of AI tools is expected and valued at Stand. Candidates should be prepared to discuss how they use AI, how they evaluate its output, and how it informs their work. Strong communication, sound judgment, and the ability to clearly articulate experience and decision-making remain core requirements. Some parts of the interview process are designed to assess independent thinking, communication, and problem-solving. If you plan to use an AI assistant or LLM during any portion of an interview, please discuss it with your interviewer in advance. Work Authorization Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. Stand does not sponsor new work visas. We can consider candidates on TN visas, O-1A visas, or H-1B transfers with three years or more remaining. Equal Opportunity Employment Stand is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status. We believe that diversity enriches the workplace, and we are committed to growing our team with the most talented and passionate people from every community. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals. If you require assistance Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.