About Careertakes

👉 Important disclosure: Careertakes is a third-party recruiting platform supporting this hiring process. If selected, you will be employed directly by our client, IT Services and IT Consulting.

Applicants for this role may also receive access to additional matched opportunities through the Careertakes platform.

---

Position Overview

Confidential Client is seeking a Software Engineer III (Contractor) to work onsite in Redmond, WA. In this role you will help transition state-of-the-art machine learning research into real-time, on-device inference for AR/VR and wearable systems. You will work closely with researchers and cross-functional engineering teams to design, optimize, and deploy ML models on embedded targets while meeting strict latency, memory, power, and compute constraints.

---

What You’ll Do

• Collaborate closely with research scientists to convert ML prototypes into efficient, real-time inference solutions on embedded hardware.
• Train, fine-tune, and adapt models with deployment constraints in mind (latency, memory footprint, power).
• Optimize models using quantization, pruning, distillation, operator fusion, and architecture improvements.
• Port, integrate, and profile models on targets such as DSPs, NPUs, microcontrollers, and mobile SoCs; identify and resolve bottlenecks.
• Write clean, maintainable, high-performance C/C++ code for on-device inference pipelines and real-time prototype systems.
• Build tools, scripts, and lightweight infrastructure to help researchers evaluate model performance and resource usage on target hardware.
• Use deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) to iterate on audio, vision, and multimodal models.
• Coordinate with hardware, runtime, and toolchain teams to integrate SDKs and inference runtimes.
• Design end-to-end ML pipelines from data prep and training to on-device deployment and monitoring.
• Profile and debug performance across both model and hardware layers using appropriate tooling.
• Participate in code reviews, documentation, and knowledge-sharing to ensure high engineering standards.
• Learn and evaluate new algorithms and hardware capabilities relevant to AR/VR, audio, and embedded ML.

---

Minimum Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 2+ years industry experience writing production-quality C/C++ code (real-time/embedded systems).
• Industry experience optimizing and running ML inference on embedded or resource-constrained devices.
• Hands-on experience training ML models using frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience profiling and debugging performance issues across ML models and target hardware.
• Strong understanding of on-device ML as a co-design problem (model architecture, quantization, hardware tradeoffs).
• Familiarity with embedded targets (DSPs, NPUs, microcontrollers, mobile SoCs) and associated toolchains.
• Ability to work in cross-functional teams and translate research requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Strong communication, documentation, and teamwork skills; ability to work in a fast-moving research environment.

---

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with ML for audio (speech enhancement, source separation, keyword spotting) and/or computer vision (detection, tracking, segmentation).
• Knowledge of audio DSP fundamentals (STFT/filterbanks, beamforming, real-time audio processing).
• Experience with on-device inference runtimes/toolchains (TFLite, LiteRT, ONNX Runtime, vendor NPU/DSP SDKs, ExecuTorch).
• Experience with model compression techniques (quantization-aware training, post-training quantization, pruning, distillation).
• Experience writing hardware-specific optimizations (SIMD/NEON, DSP intrinsics, fixed-point arithmetic).
• Prior work in AR/VR or wearable device space with real-time, user-facing applications.

---

Location & Logistics

• Location: Redmond, WA — this is an onsite contract role.
• Employment type: CONTRACTOR
• Duration: Contract (see client for exact contract length and assignment details).

---

Compensation & Benefits

• Pay Range (as listed by source): $90 - $95
• The specific compensation for this position will be determined by factors including the role scope, location, the candidate’s skills and experience, and other conditions of employment. Benefits for full-time consultants (where applicable) may include medical, dental, vision, 401(k) contributions, PTO, and other benefits required by applicable state/local law.

---

Candidate Experience & Privacy

Confidential Client and Careertakes do not ask applicants to pay fees, purchase products, or provide sensitive financial information as part of the application process. During hiring, AI tools may be used to assist with resume screening and application review; these tools support, but do not replace, human decision-making.

---

Equal Opportunity & Hiring Transparency

Careertakes and our client are Equal Opportunity Employers committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. We prohibit discrimination or harassment of any kind. To support a fair and efficient hiring process, AI tools may be used to assist with application review or resume screening. These tools do not replace human decision-making. Final hiring decisions are made by people.

If you have questions about how your data is used, please contact us directly.