AI Research Engineer

AI Research Engineer Opportunity

Poly is building a better file storage platform for everyone. We've raised $8M from YC, Bloomberg Beta, Felicis, Figma Ventures, AI Grant, and more, and we're looking to grow our founding team of superstar builders and dreamers.

Poly's intelligent file system is a desktop and web application that lets you store and browse your files with the help of a powerful multimodal AI. An easy way to wrap your head around it is to check out a demo from Abhay.

We are adamant that Poly is the future way to store files for everyone because:

1. Our product is intelligent -- all your files are indexed and searchable with an AI that can find and even sort and organize your files, search by image and many other file types, and soon ask questions about your files and watch as an AI system references your own files to give an answer.
2. We're maximally multimodal. We support any audio, video, document, office file, slide deck, text file, PDF, and a whole lot more. We even support saving web links and youtube videos to your Poly file system and asking the AI about them.
3. We're completely, 100% cross-platform -- Our product looks identical across web and desktop, with zero compromises in the UI/UX, and all your files always available and up-to-date.
4. Our product improves every 2 days, not every 2 years -- Finder and File Explorer haven't changed in years or decades because they're linked to OS upgrade cycles. Our product ships updates every day and can add all kinds of features, fixes, and file type support at light speed.
5. Many, many more reasons -- deep folder searching, beautiful view modes, extensible metadata, ergonomics, public sharing, and so much more.

We are looking to grow from a team of three (we've accomplished a lot as just two engineers and one designer!) to a clan of around eight, so you'll be anywhere from engineer #3 to #7. You'll be tasked with bringing Poly to life as a robust platform, shaping our cloud architecture to store files at breathtaking speed and scale, and improving our AI architecture to become the "search engine for your life".

Specifically, in an AI research engineer role, we are looking for the following concrete skills and prior experience:

• High baseline knowledge of core statistical modeling principles, including the ability to write down or describe core ML modeling equations such as gradient descent, scaled dot product attention, cross-entropy, and so forth.
• Extensive experience with modeling / inference tools such as pytorch and CUDA.
• Pragmatic and product focused mindset, with the passion to see any developments make it into customer hands as quickly as possible.
• Familiarity with modern LLM-based development fundamentals including prompting, function calling, and agentic workflows.
• Knowledge of Python is a must, and enthusiasm for Rust is highly encouraged.
• An extreme appetite for learning that you've honed through recursive self-improvement. You should be able to demonstrate an exceptional aptitude for automating your own development processes.
• You thrive in independent, inter-disciplinary environments, and you are skilled at collaborating across domains and for productively engaging with people of all kinds.
• You are willing to leave judgments about gender, race, creed, background, belief, or politics for outside of the workplace so that we can focus on building the world's best file storage platform for everyone.
• You are capable of (and excited to) work in-person 5-days a week in SoMa, San Francisco