AI Research Engineer

At Playground AI (”PAI”), we combine AI research and product design to invent new kinds of creative tools.

Over the next 10 years, we plan to create a powerful AI render pipeline that allows us to edit, create, and understand pixels to accomplish challenging tasks ranging from instructing an AI to make subtle changes to images, creating entire 3D environments, and understanding context of a scene in a video. We plan to start by accomplishing difficult tasks with images first.

Our mission is to awaken the imagination within each of us.

If you join us, you’ll be an early team member in helping shape:

1. Our future company culture
2. Our engineering practices
3. People that we hire
4. The direction & focus of our products

Engineers on the team today:

• Work primarily in Python and PyTorch
• Implement cutting-edge research papers to explore and learn
• A perseverance to experiment but understand not everything they accomplish will be used in our products
• Are supportive—especially when teammates are faced with new challenges
• Are left to autonomously figure out the solutions to their challenges
• Value clear, frequent communication (we do a lot of reading & writing)
• Are naturally curious and willing to take a step to learn something they don’t have experience in
• Feel a great sense of accountability to each other
• Uphold best practices in engineering, security, and design

You might be the wrong fit if…

• Publishing papers and earning citations is one of your top 3 priorities
• Working on research that ships to users hasn’t been a priority for you
• Writing production-worthy code is something you tend to avoid
• Teaching or mentoring people from time to time isn’t how you want to spend your time

Skills & Experience

• Background in Computer Vision and/or Natural Language Processing
• Track record of implementing research you can show
• Bonus: Scaling distributed systems for the purposes of training
• Having a PhD is not important to us but a track record of building real things in production is
• 4+ years of working full-time

Here are examples of things we’ve worked on:

• Building an aesthetic classifier to predict aesthetically pleasing images by user ratings
• Predicting highly accurate object masks from bounding boxes