Backend Engineer

About Humen

Humen.ai is a AI-driven synthetic media company. Here's a demo of our proprietary AI technology (viewed 800K+ times and covered by WSJ, NBC, MIT Technology Review, New Yorker etc.): youtu.be/PCBTZh41Ris. Our product (https://getsway.app) leverages generative AI to empower personalized content creation. Since launching in Q1 2020, Sway has reached #3 overall in the U.S. on iOS.

Our product uses NodeJS and Python to run a cutting-edge deep learning pipeline and support the product experience. Unlike most machine learning systems, Sway implements online, personalized model training, meaning that each end-user has a customized experience and all training must be fast enough to provide a good user experience.

Our product entertains and delights users by democratizing the most bleeding-edge AI technologies, including generative adversarial networks, real-time human pose tracking, and few-shot transfer learning. Our users will be able to dance like Bruno Mars, their favorite K-Pop artist or Hip-Hop star and share with friends. In the future the team will build new workflows and experiences for music, storytelling, gaming and more, diversifying and appealing to a much broader international audience.

The company is started by veterans from Google, Facebook, Apple, and UC Berkeley AI research. All of us have been leaders in these respective organizations. We are all still extremely hands-on and contribute individually.

Ethics

In time with the public discourse around the societal impact of synthetic media technology and being one of the first companies to create a mass market product around it, we take great responsibility and strive to prevent potential misuse of our product from day one. We deeply care about user privacy and will give users full-control to their data and image rights. While our product focuses on bringing something delightful and magical to life that would normally be impossible, we also hope that it would raise public awareness on the existence and capability of such technology.

The role

You'll be our second backend engineer.

In this role, you will build and optimize product features through a combination of API design, business logic implementation, and database operations. You will help scale the application and keep infrastructure costs within budget. You will be encouraged to be hands-on with everything from product ideation to technical operations. Your work will have a direct impact on customer experience and the viability of Humen as a company.

You will work closely with the entire team, whether to collaborate on product features with iOS development, with the machine learning team to integrate new API capabilities, or with the founders to brainstorm new features.

About you

• You are a hands-on backend or full-stack developer with prior experience using JavaScript, TypeScript, and/or Python. You understand the difference between writing a script and creating an application. You think about code organization, maintainability, and managing dependencies.
• You are comfortable writing REST APIs and using a relational database. You have a working knowledge of HTTP and SQL and know how to interact with both from the command line.
• You have at least two years of professional experience. You are comfortable with standard software development practices, especially technical design, version control, and continuous integration.
• You have more than one kind of experience. You understand that there is more than one way to work and can help us shape how we work as we grow.
• You are available full-time, locally or remotely. You are available in the Pacific timezone for at least half of the work day.

Our stack

We build our platform around simple, proven technologies and leverage the AWS ecosystem where possible: * We write our API server using NodeJS, express, and sequelize against a PostgreSQL database, deployed using AWS ECS and RDS. * We write our APIs so they automatically generate OpenAPI (Swagger) specifications. We’ve open-sourced a library that helps with OpenAPI generation. * We write internal dashboards and administrative tools as React web applications and Python CLI programs. * We write our machine learning pipeline uses Python and a number of AWS services, including ECS, EC2, Lambda, Step Function, SQS, and S3. * We manage our AWS infrastructure using packer and terraform.