Backend Engineer

Ideogram is on a mission to make professional-quality design accessible to everyone. We’re building an AI-native application that helps creative individuals and teams produce high-quality content faster and at a lower cost. We are pushing the boundaries 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, and we have a growing presence in NYC. Read our Ideogram 3.0 and Canvas blog posts, and try our product at ideogram.ai to get a glimpse of what we're building.

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

Founding Team

Our founding team consists of world-renowned AI experts including Mohammad Norouzi, Jonathan Ho, William Chan, and Chitwan Saharia. 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, which is the foundation of the recent generative media transformation.

Company Culture

We're a single flat team that transcends engineering, research, product, and operation roles. Everyone is willing to do whatever is necessary to make our company and customers successful. 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. 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.