💼 We're hiring!
By
marcel
At AIcrowd, we’re looking to grow our team with a Web Application Developer (Rails) to stabilize and expand our AI platform.
AIcrowd is a platform for running machine learning challenges, competitions, and benchmarks. We help organizations leverage the power and wisdom of the crowd to develop the best AI solutions in the world, by putting their AI problems on the AIcrowd platform. Developers from around the world then submit their solutions that our infrastructure automatically evaluates.
While we have our roots in academia, AIcrowd is now being used by both universities as well as large companies. They tackle both cutting-edge research problems - see for example the four NeurIPS challenges that are running on AIcrowd this year - as well as difficult business problems, such as letting trains learn to automatically coordinate among themselves in order to minimize delays in large train networks. It’s this mix that makes working at AIcrowd so fascinating - we are privileged to help solve some of the most challenging problems, together with some of the most talented people in their industries!
But our academic roots also start to show… The platform grew much faster than anyone had foreseen in the beginning, and in order to make all of the challenges run, we had to cut some corners in the development of the platform itself. This is of course not sustainable in the long run, which is why we want to address this problem right from the start. In addition, our back-end could use some ❤️ to make organizer’s lives easier. We’d like to get to a point where any organization can set up their AI problem on AIcrowd by themselves, no matter how small or large they are, and no matter how difficult the problem is. We thus need to expand our current platform to be able to function seamlessly as a service (“platform-as-a-service”).
Does that sound like a challenge to you?
Who we are looking for
Quite simple: we are looking for a person who has sufficient experience developing complex web applications using our webstack (Rails, PostgreSQL, AWS), and who enjoys building platforms that can be productively used and enjoyed by tens of thousands of people.
To be clear: we’re not looking for any experience in AI or machine learning whatsoever. It’ll be a benefit if you are curious about this technology, as you will be exposed to it quite a lot, and you’ll probably learn a fair bit about machine learning and AI as well during your work. But for this role, what we are looking for is the determination to build clean, stable, extensible, secure, and user-friendly web applications.
The person we’re looking for is excited by AIcrowd’s potential, will work themselves into our existing codebase quickly, discuss and decide collaboratively what needs to be done, and will execute independently, transparently, and professionally. As a startup at the cutting edge of a rapidly changing technology landscape, our specs may change quickly, and you’d have to be comfortable with that. Indeed, a knack for puzzle-solving and some excitement for technical and organizational challenges is a requirement for this position.
This is a partially remote position. That means you can work from wherever you work best - home, coworking space, coffeeshop, or anywhere else. But we also expect you to be co-located with us for some time, especially in the beginning. We do like working as a team, but we’re also convinced that a company that has a “work remote” culture has an incredibly competitive advantage. Thus, be prepared to work with us for a few weeks in Switzerland in the beginning, but after that, you can work partially or fully remotely if you want to.
About us
We’re a small team with a platform and a mission: to make collaborative AI development incredibly exciting, and to help organizations solve any AI problem though the power of crowdsourcing. Our evaluation infrastructure is quite advanced, allowing the most complicated challenges to be run on AIcrowd, which is why some of the world’s most innovative companies have chosen to work with us.
We’re obsessed with efficiency, and with user- and developer-friendly design. We strive for challenge participants to have such a great experience on AIcrowd that they will recommend it to their colleagues and their organizations when they are planning their own challenges. We’re excited by the enormous potential of our evaluation infrastructure, and can foresee multiple future use cases beyond challenges.
We’re an early-stage startup, founded in late 2018. We’re a small team of 3-5 people, depending on how you count. Given our current customers, and the potential of the platform, we’d like to grow, and this is the first role we’re hiring for. In other words, there are no processes yet, and like every startup, we are figuring things out as we go, using personal experience, and hopefully good common sense judgement. This means that this is a role for a maker, not a manager.
Re conditions - while we are an early-stage startup, we wouldn’t quite go as far as advertising “low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful”. But it is true that startups can be challenging, and not every startup will succeed. But we think we’re in an unusual position, at an unusual time in the evolution of technology, and that we have a real shot and getting this right. But for that, the most important aspect is to have the right people on the team from the beginning. What we offer is an amazing ride, great company, good conditions, and a stock option plan.
If you’re interested in joining us, please apply here.
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