Unsplash
Unsplash makes high-resolution photography freely available for any kind of use. Anyone can share photography that anyone can use however they want.
Today, Unsplash powers more products than any other visual search engine in the world, distributing photos to more viewers than any other platform, including Instagram. Millions of creatives of all types, professions, and demographics download more than 50 million photos per month, making Unsplash more used than Adobe, Getty, and Shutterstock combined.
Our API powers not just our own products, but also some of the largest creative platforms including Medium, Adobe, Squarespace, and Google, as well as products like Codepen, Product Hunt, Square, and Invision.
Despite Unsplash’s large community, our product team is a small group of engineers, designers, and data scientists distributed throughout the world.
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The photos are free, so how do you make money?
Creativity is becoming mainstream and everyone needs access to high-quality visuals, whether it's for presentations, blog posts, social media, websites, or art. As this has expanded the size of the visuals market to hundreds of millions of creators, it creates a new business model to best supply this audience.
Due to the open nature of the photo license and the internet, Unsplash can distribute a photo further than any other visual platform in the world.
We work with our photographers and high-quality brands to distribute strong visuals to build brand awareness and associations authentically. This is a win-win for everyone involved: creators get access to high-quality free visuals, brands have a platform to distribute authentic and non-invasive visuals across the internet, photographers are paid, and Unsplash builds a business that matches our mission, team, and the future of creation.
Why join us?
Unsplash photography supports 10 billion image requests per month. We had more image requests in the last 6 months than our previous four-and-half-year history.
We're building a lean team of only exceptional, product-driven people. Five years in, our engineering team handles more scale per person than Facebook's engineering team did, with more than 5M users per engineer.
Over 20 Unsplash photos are downloaded per second. That's more than Shutterstock, Getty Images, and Adobe Stock combined, making Unsplash the largest visual library in the world. We're growing 20%+ quarter-over-quarter.
A featured photo on Unsplash is seen by more people than the front page of the New York Times.
Since the Unsplash API was introduced a little over a year ago, 500+ developer partners including Apple, Squarespace, Adobe, Trello, FiftyThree, Medium, and Square are using Unsplash to power their products.
We don’t believe in a top-down, shoulder-tapping, 9–5 type culture. You have the autonomy to manage yourself. We don’t work set hours. We respect flow. We believe you should be able to structure your days for what makes you feel the most energized and creative.
We're making an industry covered in legal red tape, open and free.
Engineering at Unsplash
We operate on 6-week cycles. In between each cycle, we leave a week open for retros and planning. The entire team is involved in creating the next roadmap. We don't have any project/product managers.
We operate in teams of usually no more than three people per project. Each team runs their own projects.
Incremental change: whenever possible, we split work into reasonable, easily-reviewable chunks. Even when upgrading a critical piece of infrastructure, we take the time to refactor our code in multiple preparation steps so that migrations are smooth and straightforward.
Optimization: we regularly improve the user experience by identifying bottlenecks in how we use our tools (React, Redux, React Router, etc). When we realize we’ve been doing something inefficiently, we immediately course-correct. We’re not scared to ditch old patterns, but we do our best to study new ones before adopting them.
80/20 split: we usually spend 80% of a given week on big projects, and 20% on technical debt. It might not always be the case, but we consistently think of both areas when prioritizing work.
We solve user problems, not technology problems: We are here to build a product, not obsess over tools or over-architect software. No one is tasked with dev ops and everyone spends the majority of their time on experimentation and new feature development to fuel growth.
Our aim is to build the most useful visual library ever created.
Today, Unsplash powers more products than any other visual search engine in the world. The Unsplash API supports unsplash.com, Unsplash for iOS, and 500+ applications including Medium, Trello, Adobe, Google, and Square, handling over 1 billion requests per month and tracking over 10 billion events per month.
We're depended on every day as a fundamental building block in the creative process. While we’ve accomplished a lot with Unsplash, we’re still at the very beginning of our journey as a product and a business. We still have a lot to prove. We need to continue to work toward building a best-in-class visual search system and API infrastructure to support the visual needs of the digital era.
Support and design the technical implementation of the search engine, recommendations, and related content algorithms with help from the Search Engineering Director
Support scaling of API platform to 100s of billions of requests per month
Responsible for all website feature development, organization, and monitoring features with 15M monthly active users
Work with design team and API Director of Engineering to prioritize new features to drive on-site growth, like topics, better image uploading, analytic tools for photographers and advertisers, reverse image search, and more
Working at Unsplash
Our team is made up of people who enjoy making things people love. We designed our company in a way to get as much of the stuff that’s not the creative work out of your way, so you can do your best work.
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Generous Vacation
3 weeks MINIMUM vacation.
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Work from Home
We're a remote first company
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Workshops/Conferences
Conferences & Learning budget
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Company Retreats
Team retreats 1-2 times a year
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Relocation
If you'd like to relocate to Montreal, we provide $8,000 lump sum to cover out-of-pocket costs associated with relocation
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Other
Equity
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Flexible Hours
You manage your time. You set your working hours.
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Maternal/Paternal Leave
If you have a baby, you're paid for any time you need to take off. The time you take off will be your judgment. This is an important time and we don't want to be deciding which days you should be taking off or not. We'll be there for you. If we feel the balance is not quite right or if you have any questions, we'll chat.
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Pet Friendly
Obviously if you work from home, but also if you relocate to Montreal. Our office is pet friendly.
External Links
- https://www.wired.com/2017/05/unsplash-api/
- https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/11/06/unsplashs-new-api-puts-30000-free-photos-in-your-app/
- https://medium.com/unsplash/ive-been-sharing-my-photography-for-free-on-unsplash-for-the-past-4-years-here-s-what-i-found-7af80c8df39f
- https://blog.trello.com/unsplash-photo-board-backgrounds
- https://medium.com/unsplash/the-future-of-photography-and-unsplash-811f114aab7a
- http://www.vanschneider.com/how-to-get-a-job-at-unsplash
Interested in this company?
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