Machine Learning Engineer

About Hedra:

Hedra is a pioneering video foundation model company founded by former Stanford PhDs and backed by top investors at Index, A16Z, and Abstract Ventures. We're building a full-stack creation studio capable of control, emotion, and creative intelligence.

We raised 10 million dollars in our seed round to revolutionize content creation. Our flagship product, the Character foundation model, launched in late June and garnered national attention, landing us on the top of Reddit (multiple times!) and Twitter. In early October we released Character-2, which has already produced highly creative and viral content.

Note: Hedra is not a 9-5 job, we’re a team of passionate individuals seeking to fundamentally change content and build a generational company together. You must be willing to work in-person in either NYC or SF.

Summary:

As our Machine Learning Engineer, you will build and manage the services and infrastructure that power and serve our models and the videos that they generate. You will combine best in class knowledge building backend services, maintaining our infrastructure as code, and deploying the models that power our services. You will work with passionate engineers and top researchers to build a truly disruptive and novel technology. We’re looking for full-time hires for our New York or San Francisco offices.

Experience:

• Experience accelerating and deploying latent diffusion models, diffusion transformers, or state space models using best pytorch practices and tensorrt.

• Building out and scaling our cloud-based infrastructure (in AWS and Oracle clouds), leveraging Kubernetes (EKS), infrastructure as Code (Terraform).

• Experience developing/scaling pipelines, event streaming/processing in AWS, using tools such as SQS or Kafka.

• Startup Experience is a must — we work hard and build quickly. This is not a 9-5 nor weekday only job.

• Experience architecting and implementing REST APIs for distributed systems.

• Experience with k8s, docker, especially in the context of deploying machine learning models on nvidia hardware.

• At least 5 years of professional Python or Golang.

Personality:

• Self-motivated and independent — able to set accurate timelines for development and deliver on them. Have an opinion and the experience to backup that opinion.

• Low ego, high patience, strong communication skills.

• Understand operational costs and overhead short and long term.

• Mission-driven — we are building something fundamentally disruptive and this reflects deeply in our company DNA.

• And most importantly, treat Hedra as your own and help shape the vision accordingly

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation and equity.

• 401k.

• Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental).

• Gym access (at our office).

About the founders:

Michael Lingelbach (CEO) - Before taking a leave of absence to start Hedra, Michael was a PhD student at Stanford jointly advised by Jiajun Wu and Fei-Fei Li. Michael has published in top computer science conferences such as ICRA and CoRL, with a focus on building large-scale simulation platforms for computer vision and robotics. He has also made notable contributions to several open source projects (iGibson, OmniGibson). He’s a passionate cinephile, former thespian, and huge fan of Denis Villeneuve.

Alex Bergman (Chief Scientist) - Alex recently received his PhD from Stanford working with Gordon Wetzstein. Alex has made significant contributions to neural rendering research, resulting in publications at top machine learning and computer vision conferences such as NeurIPS and ICCV. He is especially interested in packaging the benefits of neural rendering technology in tools which are intuitive to use for creatives. Outside of work, Alex enjoys traveling, movies, and spending time outdoors.