krea | core technical staff member | full-time in-person in san francisco, ca

• (some) tools we use: duckdb, postgresql, tigris (globally replicated s3), kubernetes, svelte(kit), pytorch (nightly builds), redis, multi-cloud stuff, figma, vercel (in weird ways)...

• some tools we are likely to use (ordered by likelihood): bun, flydragon, jax, & clickhouse, and maybe some basic stuff (e.g. queues, mails, etc.) from vendors who'll try to lock us in (likely cloud providers).

the current "role needs" are around web/networking/UI/databases/product. so, we will prioritize people interested/leaning towards those tasks/technologies -- but, if what you read below is enticing, please reach out either way.

FAQs:

• why svelte? bullish on compiler-first approach to surgically update DOM.
• remote? no[*].
• what's the role about? we are still only 8 people, so you'll have to work on many things, but we're particularly bottlenecked in frontend-kind of work.
• am i going to write typical react-like slop? ngl, big part of every core member is writing slop code—but slop manifests differently every day; sometimes it's solving CUDA hell-like errors, sometimes is by writing many (jupyter/jupytext) notebooks while doing experiments, sometimes is debugging CORS, and sometimes is writing UI code that is not that stimulating but helps our >millions of active users. but, we also expect for you to know (or be really curious!) about data structures, algorithms, computer architecture, low&high level languages, and so on because, every now and then, a very hairy technical problem manifests and all core technical staff members should be able to tackle them. having said that, we will prioritize folks interested in UI / web / frontend work, because of our short-term concerns, but we won't discard someone exceptional.
• how early are you? depends on how you look at it. in terms of our vision or team size (as per typical standards), very early; from a financial point of view, we are very close to profitability, but we are choosing to double down on R&D (hence this post).
• visa? yes; the majority of immigrants at krea are either a O-1A or EB-1A visa holders[2].
• comp/benefits? great base comp; benefits where krea pays for a great health insurance and fully -- we expect you to take great care of our business and in return we promise taking care of you; exceptionally high equity. for base and equity, exact numbers vary depending on many factors like: exceptionality, experience, or how early you join.
• founders/team? we are biased of course, so take this with a grain of salt: our team is excellent. we are lacking a bit in terms of AI research talent, but we're quickly ramping up on that side (there are many candidates in the pipeline from excellent AI research institutions). our team is comprised of folks who started companies before, built software downloaded millions of times, did research at institutions like MIT, Microsoft Research, or earned one of the most prestigious scholarships of their country awarded by the head of state (the last statement holds true for 2 members of the team; they both dropped out to start krea). still, we are still learning every day and we make embarrassing mistakes like any other human; we believe in asymptotically reaching perfection through constant iteration.
• are you VC-backed? yes, by folks like the founder of Facebook AI Research, founding members of OpenAI, or the AI fund from Google.

how do i apply? send an email to the email listed in my profile (leave the plus alias so that your email can jump into the top of my inbox).

[*]: we’re focused on building the core team for krea. if a candidate is exceptionally successful, we expect them to grow into an executive. in order to absorb the context/domain-specific-knowledge you'll need as an executive at an adequate rate you need to work next to everybody. if you only want remote, we may have contractor-based work for you, but please be explicit about that in your application.