T

Taste Labs

Design taste data for training AI models

Growth Associate

Full-Time
$90k - $135k/yr
Junior
San Francisco, CA, USA
In Person
People & HRGeneralist Recruiting

About the job

Requirements
  • One to two years of experience in sourcing, growth, sales development, or a similar outbound-heavy role, including work toward aggressive targets and the ability to diagnose what is not working.
  • Ability to research creatively and resourcefully to find non-obvious talent and communities.
  • Ability to question assumptions, identify patterns, and test hypotheses.
  • Ability to work with high urgency and follow up quickly.
  • Ability to work independently in a startup environment, starting from problems rather than waiting for instructions.
  • Ability to collaborate across product, operations, design, and research.
  • Experience using AI tools to research, automate repetitive work, and operate faster.
Responsibilities
  • Map where exceptional creative talent is located and determine how to reach people who are not actively looking.
  • Build sourcing strategies from scratch for the hardest-to-fill roles.
  • Test platforms, tools, messaging, and outreach approaches to identify what works.
  • Build targeted lists and outreach that elicit responses.
  • Move TasteMakers from first contact through completed assessment quickly.
  • Turn experiments into playbooks, automations, and workflows so each new search starts ahead of the previous one.
  • Track channel performance and downstream quality, and increase focus on what works.
Desired Qualifications
  • Genuine interest in creative work and an eye for quality.
  • Experience building sourcing or growth strategies for niche, hard-to-reach audiences.
  • A background in human data, recruiting, marketplaces, or creative industries.

About the company

T

Taste Labs

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Taste Labs builds the data and infrastructure layer that AI systems use to judge subjective quality, starting with design. The company measures, classifies, and codifies aesthetic judgment into data models that systems can train on, then supplies the context, evaluation, and verification tooling that sits on top. It works with frontier labs on post-training to improve taste and design capability, and with app developers, coding agents, and creative-tool companies checking the design work their models produce. Unlike benchmarks that score correctness, it targets the harder question of whether output is good, on-brand, or right for a particular person. The company's goal is to give models reliable judgment by turning taste into training data instead of leaving it to prompt engineering.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Seed

Total Funding

$18.5M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2025

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Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Business Insider reported tens of millions in revenue and thirty employees on September 29, 2026.
  • The Brand API launched free trial access and paid plans on September 15, 2026.
  • Village Roadshow launched Fright Nights Horror Quest with Taste Labs on October 1, 2026.

What critics are saying

  • A 1,000-person tastemaker network costs heavily and invites quality drift by 2027.
  • OpenAI, Adobe, and Canva can bundle brand controls into existing creative suites fast.
  • If frontier labs internalize subjective evals, Taste Labs loses its entire data-infrastructure wedge.

What makes Taste Labs unique

  • Thais Castello Branco built Taste Labs around tastemakers, not generic crowdworkers, on June 16, 2026.
  • The September 15 Brand API turns websites into extract, search, and verify workflows.
  • Taste Labs targets frontier labs and app builders with preference data plus brand verification.

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Benefits

  • Remote Work Options
  • Flexible Work Hours

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

-22%

1 year growth

-22%

2 year growth

-22%
Volume Media
Oct 2nd, 2026
Village Roadshow Theme Parks and Taste Labs unveil Fright Nights Horror Quest.

Village Roadshow Theme Parks and Taste Labs unveil Fright Nights Horror Quest. October 2, 2026 This October, the nightmare follows you home. Village Roadshow Theme Parks and Australian creative technology company Taste Labs have joined forces to launch Fright Nights Horror Quest, a month-long digital choose-your-own-adventure experience inspired by the original stories, characters and terrifying world of the Gold Coast's famed Fright Nights. Launching lastnight, 1 October at 6PM, Horror Quest invites fans to create their own character, enter the Fright Nights universe and make a series of choices that shape their journey - with a brand-new collectible trading card unlocked every night from October 1 through to Halloween on October 31. With story cards and character cards to collect across 31 nights, each card features different rarities determined by the choices players make throughout their adventure. Fans can hunt down the complete set, collect their favourite character cards or even have their cards printed and shipped directly to their door. Designed as a digital companion to the Fright Nights guest experience, Horror Quest gives fans another way to immerse themselves in the event's original stories, characters and lore throughout the Halloween season - whether they're at home on their phone or desktop, or inside the park on the Gold Coast. Renee Soutar, CMO, Village Roadshow Theme Parks, said: "Fright Nights has always been about immersive storytelling, bringing together compelling characters, detailed environments and live experiences that place its guests at the centre of the action. Fright Night's Horror Quest adds an exciting new dimension to that experience, allowing fans to discover more of the story around their visit to the park and continue engaging with the world of Fright Nights throughout October. "As audiences increasingly move between physical and digital entertainment, we are always looking at new ways to evolve the guest experience. This collaboration with Taste Labs gives us an opportunity to explore how digital storytelling can complement what happens inside the park, deepen engagement with the original Fright Nights stories and give fans even more reasons to be part of the event." Using their mobile or desktop, participants enter the Horror Quest world and make choices that determine how their character and story evolve. Those decisions then shape their personalised collectible cards, with each player building a unique collection based on their individual journey. But the adventure doesn't stop at the screen. Throughout Horror Quest, participants can uncover real-life rewards to redeem in the park, including the chance to earn tickets, annual passes and Fright Nights merchandise. In turn, a digital journey can lead fans straight back into the real-world Fright Nights experience. Taste Labs Co-Founder and CEO Alex Flamsteed said: "Fright Nights already has the most important ingredients: great storytelling, distinctive characters and a world that audiences genuinely want to explore. Technology gives Volume Media an opportunity to build new ways for fans to interact with that world without changing what makes it valuable in the first place. "What is particularly exciting is that digital and physical entertainment don't need to operate as separate experiences. Someone can encounter Fright Nights on the Gold Coast, continue discovering the stories at home, build a collection around their journey and potentially find themselves back inside the park through the rewards they uncover along the way. "For entertainment companies, that creates an opportunity to think differently about the lifecycle of an intellectual property. The relationship with an audience doesn't necessarily have to begin and end at a single event, release or visit. Done carefully, technology can create meaningful new touchpoints around existing IP and give fans more reasons to remain connected to the worlds they already love. "We are incredibly proud that an Australian company has had the opportunity to develop this experience with the Village Roadshow Theme Parks team, bringing together their storytelling and guest expertise with a new digital format designed to stimulate fandom." With a new chapter unlocking every night, Fright Nights Horror Quest gives fans 31 chances to return to the world of Fright Nights, make a different choice and discover what lies behind the next card. Fright Nights Horror Quest will officially launch online on Thursday 1 October at 6PM AEST.

Business Insider
Sep 29th, 2026
Taste Labs raises $18.5M to train AI models on quality design and creativity

Taste Labs, a startup with $18.5 million in funding, aims to train AI models to produce higher-quality creative work by teaching them to recognise good taste. The San Francisco company works with a network of about 1,000 "Tastemakers" — contractors in creative fields who evaluate AI outputs and create taxonomies of quality across design elements. CEO Thais Castello Branco argues current AI produces technically correct but aesthetically bland results. The startup is beginning with visual design, breaking down elements like typography, colour, and spacing into measurable components before expanding to copywriting, fiction, music, and cinematography. Investors say the company already generates tens of millions in revenue, working with major AI labs. Its first product is a Brand API that extracts and systematises visual components from company websites to ensure consistent AI-generated content.

MeetBri
Aug 4th, 2026
AI weekly: the war on slop.

AI weekly: the war on slop. The AI conversation flipped from volume to quality, and every fix is human judgment The war on slop. "AI agents" came up in 33% of last week's business podcast episodes, up from 26% a month ago, the biggest mover of any AI term Meet Bri track. The agents are everywhere. And the conversation about them just flipped from volume to quality. The word for the failure mode is slop, and last week marketing, venture, engineering, and research all declared war on it. Product leader Hillary Gridley called internal AI slop an epidemic and described the failure spiral: people stop questioning AI output, "the people get worse, that makes the systems worse, and then you get into this sort of slop doom loop." Her diagnosis is that slop is a leadership failure, not a tool failure. If nobody defines what good looks like, "You can't be surprised when that quality starts slipping." Venture is now funding the fix. Thais Castello Branco just raised an $18.5 million seed for Taste Labs, a company that pays roughly a thousand designers and critics to teach models what good looks like, because models trained to converge on the most likely answer are structurally biased toward average. Jason Calacanis put the consumer version bluntly: "The people who build these things have no taste. Let's be honest. They don't have taste." The platforms are moving too. LinkedIn shipped a report-slop button. Substack shipped anti-AI detection tools. Engineering had the same argument with different words. The "software factory" push, teams cutting code review to push agentic code straight to production, runs into a benchmark gap: a benchmark "will tell you whether or not the code works, but it doesn't actually tell you anything about whether or not it's maintainable." The research world gave the phenomenon its scientific name: cognitive debt. Researcher Margaret-Anne Storey watched student teams build MVPs in weeks with AI, then hit a wall when nobody understood what they had built. "With cognitive surrender, you're surrendering not just your understanding of it, but also your ability to learn." Her prescription is strategic friction, borrowed from a colleague's line that "cars have brakes" so they can go faster. Here is the convergence worth noticing. Nobody in these four conversations is mad at the models. They are mad at the humans who stopped supervising them. Every prescription on offer, rubrics, paid tastemakers, code review as back pressure, deliberate friction, is a mechanism for putting codified human judgment back in the loop. First drafts became free last year. The value moved to whoever sets the standard. Sources: Hillary Gridley (ex-WHOOP), Marketing Against the Grain, "If Your Team Is Producing AI Slop, Here's How To Fix it," Jul 28, 2026. Thais Castello Branco (Taste Labs), This Week in Startups, "Why AI has no taste and how to fix it," Jul 31, 2026. Ben Lloyd Pearson and Andrew Zigler (LinearB), Dev Interrupted, "The rise of software factories, the fall of first drafts, and the hidden tax holding back your agents," Jul 31, 2026. Margaret-Anne Storey (University of Victoria), Tech Lead Journal, "From Technical Debt to Triple Debt: The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Code," Jul 27, 2026. The slop backlash is a judgment crisis: rubrics, paid tastemakers, code review, and deliberate friction all put codified human standards back in the loop.

CRV
Jun 16th, 2026
Leading the $18.5 Million Seed in Taste

By Veronica Orellana, Reid Christian and Mia Krishnamurthy