Palona is building AI for the physical world, starting with restaurants. Understanding a busy restaurant means making sense of people, objects, activities, and events as they change over time, despite occlusion, changing lighting, varied camera views, and incomplete information.

We are looking for an AI Research Engineer with a strong research background in computer vision and vision-language models (VLMs) to develop the visual intelligence behind Palona’s products. You will work on image and video understanding, spatiotemporal reasoning, and multimodal models that connect visual observations to useful insights and actions in real restaurant environments.

This role combines research depth with ownership of working systems. You will formulate research questions, build datasets, train and evaluate models, and partner with product and engineering to bring successful approaches into production. Researchers and engineers from autonomous driving, robotics, embodied AI, and related perception fields are especially encouraged to apply.

What you’ll own




- Develop computer vision and VLM approaches for scene understanding, object detection and tracking, activity recognition, and understanding events across video.
- Adapt, fine-tune, and evaluate vision and vision-language models for visual grounding, temporal reasoning, and structured prediction grounded in observable evidence.
- Design training and adaptation strategies, including supervised fine-tuning, representation learning, distillation, and domain adaptation, based on measurable product needs.
- Build representative image and video datasets, annotation workflows, and evaluation sets that capture difficult edge cases while protecting sensitive data.
- Create rigorous experiments and benchmarks that measure perception quality, temporal consistency, hallucinations, robustness, latency, and cost across locations and operating conditions.
- Diagnose failures caused by occlusion, lighting changes, camera placement, rare ev

📌 AI Research Engineer, Computer Vision (Los Altos)
🏢 Palona
📍 Los Altos