Senior Software Engineer

Summary

This role can either be fully in-person or remote.

Much of the work we do at Imbue is effectively pure software engineering. Our perspective is that even machine learning research ends up being about 90% software engineering, so even without any prior machine learning knowledge, there is plenty to contribute as a normal software engineer. Even most of our machine learning research tends towards the software engineering side of the spectrum, as we prefer to automate the types of work that academic researchers typically do (ex: tuning hyperparameters, experimenting with small variations in network architectures, etc).

Example projects

• Work on data-related functions, such as optimizing parallelized deduplication algorithms, or leveraging open source libraries to associate metadata tags to our training data.

• Work on infrastructure-related functions, such as building a dashboard to track which research experiments are currently running, when they will finish, and what was the last error that caused a crash in a distributed training run.

• Work on MLOps-type work, such as profiling CUDA programs and looking for optimizations in the way we call ML training frameworks.

• Assist with implementing ML research papers, such as building a clean abstraction for online reinforcement learning algorithms to be connected to human annotators.

• Introduce caching into inference or other workloads, and then make caching actually work.

• In summary: Implement out all the messy details needed to get code just working.

You are

• Very comfortable writing Python.

• Familiar with PyTorch and training deep neural networks.

• Excited to work on open source code.

• Passionate about engineering best practices.

• Self-directed and independent.

• Excellent at getting things done.

Compensation and Benefits

• Work directly on creating software with human-like intelligence.

• Generous compensation, equity, and benefits.

• $20K+ yearly budget for self-improvement: coaching, courses, conferences, etc.

• Actively co-create and participate in a positive, intentional team culture.

• Spend time learning, reading papers, and deeply understanding prior work.

• Compensation packages are highly variable based on a variety of factors. If your salary requirements fall outside of the stated range, we still encourage you to apply. The range for this role is $170,000–$350,000 cash, $10,000–$2,000,000 in equity.

How to apply

All submissions are reviewed by a person, so we encourage you to include notes on why you're interested in working with us. If you have any other work that you can showcase (open source code, side projects, etc.), certainly include it! We know that talent comes from many backgrounds, and we aim to build a team with diverse skillsets that spike strongly in different areas.

We try to reply either way within a week or two at most (usually much sooner).

Learn more about our full interview process here.

About us

Imbue builds AI systems that reason and code, enabling AI agents to accomplish larger goals and safely work in the real world. We train our own foundation models optimized for reasoning and prototype agents on top of these models. By using these agents extensively, we gain insights into improving both the capabilities of the underlying models and the interaction design for agents.

We aim to rekindle the dream of the *personal* computer, where computers become truly intelligent tools that empower us, giving us freedom, dignity, and agency to pursue the things we love.