Machine Learning Engineer - Layer

Engineering at Layer

We value quality at high speed at Layer. We iterate fast, quickly eliminating ideas that don’t work and focusing on ideas that do. We use code reviews, post-mortems, and automated tests effectively to help us maintain our speed while giving our users a great experience. We rely on every team member to bring their full experience and passion to their work, and we expect a lot from each other in order to continuously strive towards becoming a world-class engineering team.

The role

This person will be the first ML Engineer of our newly forming engineering team based in Istanbul, Turkey. This is a unique role and opportunity that is highly collaborative, working closely with our CEO, Product and Engineering leadership; you’ll focus on the ML core of our product, staying up-to-date with the fast moving state-of-the-art in generative AI, improving our existing ML features and pipelines, and coming up with solutions to essential user needs. In addition you’ll need to be able to identify areas to work on independently and autonomously make improvements to our product.

We are looking for someone who wants to ship beautiful and thoughtful products from their first week. You should be able to form a clear path to a solution by collaborating with the team, and take those ideas all the way to robust, production-grade models and code.

This requires being comfortable using your ML intuition and expertise to make decisions and develop quick and systematic experiments when needed to close doors. Having an overall understanding of our technical stack and necessary engineering trade-offs to balance the speed and sustainability of your implementations is also critical.

Whilst “years of experience” isn’t a term we care for, as we’re a small team, you’ll need to be comfortable working independently, identifying things to work on, and sharing your opinions, project estimates, and expertise with the team. Importantly we’re looking for a team member comfortable working in a very typical start-up environment. We move very quickly, unblock ourselves without lots of direction and discussion, work intensely, and are all passionate about Layer.

We’d love to hear from you:

If you have

• A solid grasp on deep learning fundamentals and a deep learning framework (preferably PyTorch)
• Experience training/fine-tuning and productizing ML models end-to-end
• Understanding of generative (especially diffusion), multimodal and language models
• Track record of significant contributions to research projects or transformer/diffusion based open-source libraries

Are able to

• Communicate in written and spoken English to a good standard - this is essential as all our communication as a team is in English

Are excited by

• Everything AI!
• Gaming
• Working at a start-up with the opportunity to shape our product and company

Nice to haves

• Experience with Docker or Kubernetes
• Experience optimizing models (TensorRT, TorchScript, ONNX…)
• Experience working with an international team
• Prior stints at start-ups, understanding and enjoying what this means for your working life

Location

This role can be based in our Engineering hub in Istanbul, Turkey or in the UK.