Senior AI Engineer, Vision AI

About VAELLA 
The world’s busiest spaces have more sensors and data than ever, and still no real understanding of how people move through them. VAELLA is building the perception layer that changes that. Our Vision AI turns raw sensor data into a real-time, privacy-preserving understanding of people flow in metro stations, airports, ferry terminals, offices and shopping centres. Our long-term vision is infrastructure that understands and responds to the people inside it, at a global scale. 

The AI stack is the product, and it’s solving some of the hardest problems in real-world perception: dense crowds, heavy occlusion and constantly changing scenes, all in real time on edge hardware inside customers’ buildings. Our models are already deployed in some of Europe’s most crowded infrastructures. The calls you make on architecture, data, synthetic training and edge optimization will decide how far and how fast we can scale. 

VAELLA launched in June 2026 as KONE’s first spin-out company. We own our technology, we have products in the field, and we have the backing and global reach of a world-leading industry player, with the speed and freedom of a start-up. Our ambition is to define a new category and set the global standard for it. As our senior AI Engineer you’ll shape not just the technology, but the team and the company that grow around it. 

Our culture 
We’re an ambitious, international team building a company with a global scale as default. We operate like founders: we set high goals, move fast and own outcomes end to end. Technical decisions are made by the people closest to the problem, and good ideas win regardless of where they come from. 

We share information openly, trust each other’s judgement, and keep the bar high. We don’t do innovation theatre. We ship real technology into the real world, and we learn from every deployment. 

As we scale, the people who join now will shape the technology, the team and the culture for years to come. If you want that kind of ownership and influence, this is the moment to join. 

Your role 

You’ll own the technical direction of our perception stack, from sensor data to models running in production on edge hardware in some of Europe’s busiest buildings. This is a senior, hands-on role: you’ll write code, train models and make the architecture calls, and together with our CTO you’ll turn business goals into the AI roadmap. Your models run in real time, on real sensors, in environments with thousands of people moving through them, and your work goes from experiment to deployment fast.  

You will

• Own the design and evolution of our perception models for detection, tracking and people flow estimation in dense, crowded scenes 

• Optimise models for real-time inference on edge devices, balancing accuracy, latency and throughput under tight compute budgets 

• Build our synthetic data pipeline in NVIDIA Omniverse and make sure simulated scenes improve real-world performance 

• Set up the MLOps foundations: reproducible training, evaluation against ground truth, CI/CD and monitoring of deployed models 

• Own the AI roadmap with our CTO, lead architecture reviews and mentor junior engineers as the team grows 

You might be a great fit if you have: 

• 5+ years of experience building and shipping computer vision or deep learning models into production 

• Deep hands-on experience with modern architectures for detection, tracking, segmentation or 3D perception 

• Strong Python and/or production C++ 

• Experience getting software and models running fast on constrained hardware 

• Solid MLOps and software engineering practices: CI/CD, testing, reproducibility and monitoring 

• Experience leading technical work, and you already use AI coding agents and have opinions on how to use them well 

• An MSc or PhD in a relevant field, or equivalent practical experience 

• Fluent English, our working language 

Nice to have 

• Experience with lidar, point clouds, multi-view or 3D data, or sensor fusion 

• Experience with synthetic data or simulation, and an understanding of the domain gap problem 

• Experience with NVIDIA edge platforms such as Jetson 
   

This might not be the best fit if 

• You’re looking for a people management role and want to step away from hands-on technical work 

• You prefer pure research to shipping models that run in real buildings 

• You need a detailed spec before you start or clearly defined processes to execute. We’re a young company building our own processes as we go 

• You’re looking for a remote position. We’re building for the physical world, and we move fastest when we’re together, whether that’s at the whiteboard, in the lab or on site with a customer 

Don't check all the boxes? Apply anyway! 

If you've shipped real-world vision systems and want to own the AI behind a product that is already deployed at scale, we want to hear from you, even if your background doesn't match every line above. 

Good to know 

This role is based in Helsinki. You need a valid right to work in Finland or the EU, as we’re unable to offer visa sponsorship or relocation support. 

What to expect during the hiring process: 

1. Apply by submitting your CV, and a link to relevant work, e.g. GitHub, papers or projects 

2. Technical interview with our CTO 

3. Meeting with our whole team 

4. References 

5. Offer 

The start date of this role is flexible, and we’re screening applicants on an ongoing basis. The role will be closed as soon as we find the right person. We’ll get back to every applicant by the end of the first week of December 2026.