krea : software engineers and applied researchers

krea - software engineers and applied researchers - san francisco - in-person - full-time - https://krea.ai/

• What is krea?

a company of 6 engineers making a new type of creative tool. older creative tools wrapped computer graphics advances into a performant controllable user interface (e.g. brightness, hue, saturation, etc.) and we think modern tools should do the same for the latest AI research (e.g. diffusion models).

• What are you looking for?

software engineers and applied researchers.

on software engineers: we evaluate candidates based on core/math&cs knowledge (e.g. deep grasp of I/O, understanding of web browsers' render pipelines, trade-offs and fastidiousness about software extensibility and abstractions) more than surface-level one (e.g. knows vue/react/express, postgresql, etc.); we have sent 2 offers and both candidates had ~0 experience with our technology stack and it has been the same for current employees. But, if you are interested in our stack, we use Svelte for the frontend, manage our own k8s cluster for both CPU-based containers or GPU ones, and use PostgreSQL for our database. we are still exploring different technologies regarding scaling such as horizontally scalable key-val stores. and, while we are not afraid of technology migrations or newer technology, we prefer to err on the side of speed while converging towards simplicity (e.g. hacking something together to put it in front of users and then slowly removing 3rd-party vendors of libraries once we have proven the product feature works).

on applied researchers: we evaluate candidates based on their intuitions around the state-of-the-art in the use of AI for creative applications. this usually involves a few publications at top-conferences (ICML, CVPR, NeurIPS, ...), but it is technically not required since we think many of the best applied researchers are often self-taught and even found outside traditional research institutions.

• Why now?

We have been growing consistently in terms of recurring revenue, we have many world-class backers (e.g. founder of Facebook AI Research), and there is significantly more equity upside than elsewhere as of now -- especially since our current team is smaller than competitors. Our burn rate is exceptionally low, the amount of per-engineer impact is big (measured, for example, in millions-of-users / employee is probably among the top in our sector), and our financials are great. We can disclose more details in a call.

If this sounds enticing to you, email me at d at krea dot ai