About HomayaHomaya Inc. is an early-stage technology company building retail technology with computer vision. See homaya.ai. We are launching in the US with quick-service restaurants, convenience stores and grocery. We are looking for a technical co-founder to own the technology, end to end, from the first store to the hundredth.
The role:- You own everything technical, and you build it with your own hands first.
- Vision in production. Detection, multi-object tracking and re-identification on real store cameras, at many sites.
- Vision-language models. Fine-tune, distil and calibrate compact VLMs so their outputs can be trusted in production.
- Edge. Inference on a small device in the store: PyTorch to a C++ runtime, TensorRT or ONNX Runtime, FP16 and INT8, many camera streams per box, privacy masking on the device.
- Fleet. Provision, update over the air and monitor devices across hundreds of stores.
- Cloud and data. Video and event pipelines on AWS, built to pass a SOC 2 review.
- Precision. Own the false-positive rate. Every alert a store sees has to be worth their time.
- Data engine. Evaluation sets, shadow mode and a loop that learns from real stores with few labels.
- Team. Hire and lead the engineering team after funding, with a high bar.
- Customers. Sit with operators in pilot stores and turn what you see into the product.
- Must have
- All of these, with something shipped behind each one.
- You have shipped computer vision to production on CCTV or fixed cameras, live across multiple sites.
- You have built detection, tracking and re-identification yourself, not only managed people who did.
- You have run VLMs in production: fine-tuning (LoRA or similar), distillation and calibrated outputs. You know when a VLM should verify and when a detector should decide.
- You have taken PyTorch models to the edge: C++ runtime, TensorRT or ONNX Runtime, FP16 or INT8, profiled for latency and throughput on Jetson, OpenVINO or Hailo, with many RTSP streams per device.
- You own the end metric, not the model. You can name the false-positive rate of a system you shipped, and explain how you cut it.
- You have built something from zero before: a startup, or a new product inside a company.
- You ship fast with AI-assisted development and know where it breaks.
- You can commit full-time, and you want to be a founder, not an employee.
Nice to have:- Vision work in retail, restaurants, loss prevention or workplace safety
- Integration with NVRs and VMS platforms (ONVIF, RTSP)
- Device fleets: provisioning, over-the-air updates, Yocto, remote monitoringAWS, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code (Terraform or Pulumi)SOC 2, CCPA or BIPA, and on-device privacy by design
- Go or C++ for backend and real-time systems
- Turning research papers into working code
- Time inside a strong engineering organisation of 50 or more engineers
- Synthetic data or rare-event training
- Technical selling alongside a founder: demos, security reviews, pilot readouts
- Not a fit
- Research only, with nothing running in production
- Cloud-only inference, never on a device
- Results only on public benchmarks or demo videos
- Looking for a part-time, fractional or advisory role
- Looking for a salaried job now
- The deal
Founder equity, a meaningful co-founder stake with standard four-year vesting and a one-year cliff.
Salary from funding. Until then, this is an equity role.
A short trial first. We work together on a real problem for a few weeks before equity is issued, so both sides know.
Location: US preferred. Remote works if you overlap US hours.
How to apply:
No CV. Send a short note to pradip@homaya.ai or a LinkedIn DM. Start the subject line (or the first line of your DM) with HMY-CTO-SHIPPED, then your name. Notes without it are not read. Include:
- The last vision system you shipped: cameras, sites, hardware and its false-positive rate
- One link to code, a paper or a product you built
- Where you are based and when you could start
- We reply to every note that answers all three.
