Machine Learning Engineer

Facet is building artist-centric applications that bridge the gap between tool and assistant, freeing artists to explore new ideas and produce better work. While media becomes increasingly personalized and topical, the process of creating art remains frustratingly manual. We use machine intelligence to amplify human creativity, allowing artists, designers, and creatives of every stripe to realize their visions simply and easily.

We have just launched our first product, a web-based ML-powered image editor, into private beta, and we're expanding our founding team in San Francisco. Facet is backed by Slow Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, South Park Commons, and a diverse group of designers, product thinkers, as well as AI engineers from Google Brain and Salesforce.

This role is a unique opportunity to bridge the technical and creative divide, solving difficult engineering challenges in the service of artistic goals.

You would be primarily responsible for selecting, training, deploying, and maintaining Facet's ML models, and would work across the Facet tech stack to build out ML-based features.

You might be a fit if you

• Empathize with designers, artists, and visual creative workers.
• Enjoy working on and pushing the limits of a cutting edge web development stack: Typescript, WebAssembly, WebGL, React, Redux, and Rust.
• Are excited about learning how to slice up ML models and execute them on the browser in real time with WebGL and tensorflow.js.
• Want to develop new forms of user experience that allow human designers to work collaboratively with AI.

Technical Challenges

• Real-time browser-based image processing: Performing complex editing operations on millions of pixels in real time isn’t easy. We need to use GPU acceleration, careful memory management, and extensive caching — and we’re looking at any web technology that could give us a boost. We use WebGL extensively, and we’re beginning to use WebAssembly to make sure photo editing always feels fluid.
• Splitting state-of-the-art AI models across the browser and the server: Many AI models won’t run in the browser, but we can’t get real-time interactivity by running solely on the server. We are constantly trying to figure out new ways to pre-compute as much as we can on the server, then send compact result summaries to the client that enable sophisticated real-time editing.
• Rapidly and dependably deploying new machine learning models: We are constantly training and deploying new models to help us understand photos better. We need flexible and easily-managed infrastructure that will let us change out new models as we improve them, monitor the performance of the models we have, and scale our capabilities to adapt to changing needs.

Why join us?

• AI for creative tools is something we at Facet believe very deeply in—as machine perception improves, we're truly at the cusp of a renaissance in new tools for visual artists.
• Facet is something that has the potential to become huge independent powerhouse, making creative work easier and more accessible for folks of all stripes, and we’re the right team for this problem.
• We are highly technical and we are backed by AI and product experts from Google Brain, Salesforce Metamind and FAIR. Joe founded two successful companies prior to Facet: Metamarkets was acquired by Snap last year and Premise has expanded to provide basic income and data services to underserved communities in over 30 different countries. Matt has deep expertise in computer graphics and machine learning, and previously led the engineering team at Operator.
• As a member of the founding team, you’ll have a significant influence on our product and we're top 1% in equity compensation for our early employees. We’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to write and rewrite a ton of code, and we’re going to struggle with product direction and market development. We’re being upfront because above all else we value honest communication and collaboration. There is no other way to successfully navigate a seed stage business. By working together, we can go farther, faster, and accomplish more than any of us could by ourselves.

Projects you might work on

• Building a client-side tool for matching photo colors by example.Accurate color matching is a core Facet feature that lets users quickly adjust local tone curves and in a content-aware way. Foregrounds, backgrounds, skin tones, etc. are all matched separately and blended together seamlessly. While this operation currently runs entirely on the server, we are porting it to a new Typescript implementation that uses WebGL and Tensorflow.js to run in real-time on the browser.
• Training a new object segmentation model for recognizing common photo elements: clothing, skin, sea, sky, ground, etc. Many commonly-available image segmentation and object detection models are tuned to recognized a large number of different object categories, which can be as specific as individual breeds of dogs. In the photo context, we often care about fuzzier categories, or categories specific to particular customer verticals — for example, a customer that works with fashion photos will be interested in recognizing clothing. We recently trained and deployed two new image segmentation models that recognize clothing and common image background components and provide pixel-accurate segmentations.
• Deploying our machine learning models as individual services. In order to dynamically scale to meet user load, we will need to partition our content understanding pipeline into smaller services, each of which provides a single model, and build the distributed infrastructure, model serving and monitoring to allow them to be scaled and deployed independently.

Facet benefits

• Three weeks paid vacation.
• Comprehensive health coverage and we cover 100% of your premiums.
• Maternal/paternal leave.
• Build your own work environment: customize your laptop and desk setup with any peripheral or accessory you'd like.
• Order any work-related books on the company's Amazon account.
• Flexible working hours: we have daily team stand-ups, but we understand if you work better when you're not tethered to your desk.
• Relocation assistance.
• Commuter benefits including a monthly ride-sharing stipend.

APPLY FOR THIS JOB