Backend Engineer

Ideogram

Ideogram is a new generative AI startup looking for a dedicated Backend Engineer to join the team. Our mission is to help people become more creative. We are developing state-of-the-art AI tools that will make creative expression more accessible, fun, and efficient. We are pushing the limits of what’s possible with AI, with a focus on creativity and a high standard for trust and safety. Our headquarters is in downtown Toronto, but we have a small presence in NYC too. Check out our text to image product at ideogram.ai to get a glimpse of what we’re building.

Founding Team

Our founding team consists of world-renowned AI experts including Jonathan Ho, William Chan, Chitwan Saharia, and Mohammad Norouzi. This team has previously led transformative AI projects at Google Brain, UC Berkeley, CMU, and the University of Toronto. Our fundamental work in AI includes: Imagen: Google’s text-to-image system, Imagen Video for video synthesis, Denoising Diffusion Models, WaveGrad for speech synthesis, neural speech recognition, neural machine translation, contrastive learning for learning visual representations, and generative adversarial imitation learning.

About The Role

As a Backend Engineer, you have expertise in building, debugging, and optimizing software in large-scale, high-volume environments. You will be a key participant in defining the platform roadmap and product strategy which will ultimately transform and expand the creative economy.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years developing and shipping large scale backend systems (Node.js or Python preferred)

• Experience in writing scalable and reliable code, e.g., strong data structure and algorithm fundamentals, experience with gRPC, Protobufs, MapReduce, an obsession for documentation.

• Familiarity with GCP or similar cloud technology

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

• Self-starter - able to come up to speed on complex, difficult concepts with minimal assistance

• Experience communicating complex technical issues to technical and non technical team members

• Excitement about generative AI technology and its impact on the creative economy.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience in developing machine learning models in JAX, PyTorch, and TensorFlow.

• Track record in machine learning innovation (e.g., Transformer, VAE, Denoising Diffusion models), or familiarity with such methods and experience in implementing them from scratch.

• Experience in low-level machine learning optimization, e.g., writing CUDA kernel code.

Engineering Culture

We’re a small and committed technical team that oversees engineering, research, design, product, and operation. Everyone on the team is willing to do whatever necessary to create a delightful product for our customers. We believe that a small dedicated team with a collaborative culture can move faster and build better and more coherent products than large hierarchical organizations.

As a member of our technical team, you’ll own projects end-to-end, directly engaging with our customers. From designing a machine learning system to developing the product and UX design, you will have a direct impact. At Ideogram, we provide mentorship and support to help our employees grow with the company and achieve their ambitious career goals.

Ideogram is committed to welcoming everyone, regardless of gender identity, orientation, or expression. Our mission is to remove exclusivity and barriers and encourage new thinking and perceptions, in a space of belonging. It is not about race, gender, or age, it is about the people.