About Cerrion

Cerrion builds video AI that helps manufacturers detect, understand and respond to production problems in real time. Headquartered in Zurich and backed by Creandum and Y Combinator, our platform connects to factory cameras to identify process deviations, quality issues and safety risks, and trigger alerts or automated actions. Our technology is deployed in factories across more than 15 countries, helping production teams reduce downtime and waste.

The Role

We’re hiring an Applied Researcher to set and execute the research agenda for Cerrion’s video‑AI platform and turn bold hypotheses into measurable gains in accuracy, robustness, and latency. We’re looking for a superstar who brings founder‑style ownership across the end‑to‑end research lifecycle — problem framing, data curation, rapid prototyping, experiment design, and rigorous evaluation — balancing scientific depth with pragmatism and a strong bias for shipping. You’ll work directly with our technical leadership and the research team to prioritize the research roadmap, run a fast and reproducible experiment pipeline, and partner with Engineering to turn promising ideas into production‑ready models.

Your responsibilities

• Run Fast, Reproducible Experiments: Design and run searches; keep configs, seeds, and artifacts tidy for one‑click reruns.

• Diagnose Bad Runs: Trace failures across data, augmentations, labels, and training dynamics; implement quick fixes and verify with targeted evals.

• Curate & Improve Data: Define datasets, create focused error sets, manage sampling/imbalance, and partner on labeling/QA to close the loop.

• Own Evaluation: Build and maintain a rigorous eval suite (accuracy/robustness/latency/cost), plus small dashboards for trend tracking and failure clustering.

• Prototype to Production: Convert promising ideas into production‑ready models in partnership with Engineering (tests, packaging, canary, monitoring).

• Optimize for Cost & Latency: Profile training/inference, choose efficient architectures, and keep GPU hours and serving budgets in check.

• Communicate Clearly: Make sure the experimental environment is clean and documented so that the experimental knowledge is well-preserved.

• Build the Function: Establish research hygiene (coding standards, review, documentation) and help shape hiring as the team grows.
  

Desired Skills and Experience

• Applied ML/CV Experience: 2+ years working with real‑world models (images or video), Kaggle experience would be a plus

• Relevant education: Masters or PhD in Computer Science or related field with strong computer vision or machine learning understanding

• Strong Python + PyTorch: Comfortable writing clean training/eval loops

• Experiment Operations: Hands‑on with ML experiment platforms (ClearML, etc.)

• Data‑Centric Mindset: Practical know‑how in augmentations, class imbalance, sampling strategies, label quality, and active‑learning basics.

• Evaluation Rigor: Fluency with mAP/F1/IoU/ROC‑PR, calibration, robustness tests, and dataset/version management for reproducible comparisons.

• Collaboration & Writing: Able to turn findings into clear recommendations and work closely with Engineering, Product, and GTM.
  

Preferred ML Qualifications

• Video & Tracking: Experience with temporal models (2D/3D CNNs, transformers), multi‑object tracking, motion/occlusion handling.

• Foundation/Multimodal: Familiarity with pretraining, VLM adapters/LoRA, or lightweight finetuning of foundation models.

• Scale & Search: Distributed training (DDP/FSDP), HPO frameworks (Optuna/Ray Tune), and thoughtful compute budgeting.

• Model Optimization: Distillation, pruning, quantization; deployment with ONNX Runtime/TensorRT; edge/real‑time constraints a plus.

• Data Tooling: Labeling ops, weak supervision, synthetic data generation/augmentation pipelines.

• Domain Context: Prior work in video analytics for industrial or safety‑critical environments.
  

Why Cerrion

• Ownership & impact: Own improvements to vision systems that run continuously in real factories and help production teams reduce downtime and waste.

• Growth path: Develop your expertise across applied computer vision, production software and MLOps, with support from an experienced technical team.

• Culture: We operate with flat hierarchies and a get‑things‑done mentality. You’ll work with ambitious colleagues from all over the world in a collaborative environment where the best idea wins.

• Compensation & equity: Competitive salary, meaningful stock option package and comprehensive benefits.

• Location: Modern office in the heart of Zurich; enjoy the quality of life of Switzerland and the dynamism of a high‑growth startup.

Cerrion is an equal opportunity employer. We embrace and celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We are open to all groups of people without regard to age, color, national origin, race, religion, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital status, or any other legally protected characteristics.