Company Description
Vardera Labs is building the next generation of infrastructure for the art, auction, and collectibles industry by utilizing cutting-edge AI, computer vision, and automation. Our solutions empower auction houses worldwide by streamlining catalog creation, data strategy, and operational excellence. We are a small, venture-backed team with a bold mission to modernize a multi-billion-dollar market during a critical moment of generational ownership transfer and digital transformation.
What You’ll Do
- Design and deploy computer vision systems that identify, grade, and authenticate physical assets across categories like coins, comics, jewelry, and fine art.
- Build and fine-tune multimodal models that combine visual, textual, and structured data to deliver accurate, explainable outputs.
- Prototype rapidly: leverage foundation models, open-source frameworks, and custom training pipelines to reach production-ready performance quickly.
- Define and evolve accuracy and quality metrics beyond standard loss functions — optimizing for the real-world economics of error and trust.
- Create robust evaluation and monitoring pipelines that track performance by category, lighting condition, and visual defect type.
- Work directly with founders and customers to turn ambiguous problems into measurable, repeatable, high-accuracy solutions.
- Hustle on speed: ship usable models in days/weeks, not months, while stacking learnings into a long-term defensible data moat.
What We’re Looking For
- Strong foundation in computer vision, deep learning, and applied ML (e.g., segmentation, detection, embedding models).
- Experience with modern CV toolkits — PyTorch, YOLO, SAM, Detectron, CLIP, or similar.
- Comfort working across image data pipelines, from annotation strategy to model deployment and feedback loops.
- Pragmatic engineer who balances rigor with velocity: knows when to experiment, when to productionize, and when “good enough” drives impact.
- Excitement to join a post-seed startup where model accuracy and innovation directly shape customer value.
Why Join
- Founding-team impact at a venture-backed company redefining valuation, grading, and authentication for multi-trillion-dollar asset classes.
- A chance to shape how computer vision and AI are applied to markets that have never had transparent or measurable standards.
- Work directly with experienced founders (repeat founders, published AI research) in a culture that prioritizes autonomy, rapid iteration, and tangible results.
Compensation
- Salary level matching seed-stage hires (relative to experience and fit): $175,000 - $250,000
- Equity: Meaningful early equity in a high growth startup
Location
- Hybrid with periodic in-person offsites and industry conferences. While we have a bias towards in person in Boston, it’s not required everyday, but expected you spend >50% of your time in the office.
