Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Sensors & Intelligence

The role

You will lead research and development of multimodal foundation models using sensor, video, and physiological signals. You will turn multimodal data into representations of human movement, effort, and fatigue to power adaptive coaching and health models.

What you will do

• Lead research and development of multimodal foundation models
• Design self-supervised pretraining strategies for long, heterogeneous time series data
• Develop sensor fusion approaches
• Advance computer vision methods for human pose estimation and motion reconstruction
• Build models that estimate biomechanical and physiological quantities
• Define evaluation frameworks and benchmarks
• Validate model outputs against gold-standard references
• Work with ML Engineering to adapt research models for cloud deployment and on-device inference
• Publish regularly at top venues and represent Tonal in the research community
• Mentor scientists and engineers and help set the scientific direction

Required qualifications

• Proven independent researcher with a strong track record of publications in relevant venues
• Deep expertise in at least one of the following: sensor fusion, biomechanics, physiological signal modeling, or computer vision for human motion
• Hands-on experience designing, training, and debugging transformer architectures
• Proven ability to train and develop ML models end to end in PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow
• Strong grounding in signal processing
• Rigorous experimental design
• Ability to independently define and drive ambiguous research problems toward measurable product impact
• Clear communicator

Nice to have

• PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Biomechanics, or a related field
• Experience pretraining or scaling foundation models, including distributed training and an understanding of scaling behavior
• Familiarity with musculoskeletal modeling tools (e.g., OpenSim, MuJoCo, MyoSim) or physics-informed ML
• Experience with wearable physiological signals such as IMU, PPG, HRV, or EMG data
• Experience with personalization, few-shot adaptation, or uncertainty quantification
• Experience with model compression or efficient architectures for edge deployment
• Background in human subjects research, data collection protocols, or validation studies
• Interest in fitness, sports science, or digital health

About the company

Tonal is looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join our Sensors & Intelligence team and help build foundation models of human movement and physiology.