ML Open Source Lead

Role Description

The open-source ML leader serves as a bridge between Ideogram’s internal research teams and the broader AI ecosystem. This person will be tasked with turning foundational research into usable, high-quality public tooling, while actively growing and maintaining a healthy developer community.

• Open-Source Strategy: Define and execute a vision for releasing open model weights, methodologies, and code.
• Community Leadership: Oversee GitHub and Huggingface repositories.
• Advocacy & Outreach: Champion open science by building open source demos (e.g. implementing lora fine-tuning for our models), writing technical blogs, answering questions from the community, and presenting at conferences.
• Ecosystem Collaboration: Partner with model providers, internal engineers, and external contributors to push AI accessibility forward.
• Research-to-Release: Convert internal, proprietary implementations into polished open-source code, ensuring quality, reproducibility, and ease of use for the community.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree or equivalent research experience in Machine Learning or Deep Learning, or a related field.
• Uses personal and professional platforms to amplify open research initiatives and invite collaboration.
• Strong hands-on experience in Python and ML research libraries such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
• Familiarity with LLMs and modern deep learning architectures (e.g., Transformers, diffusion models, reinforcement learning with human feedback).
• Experience publishing research or working on open-source projects in ML, computer vision, or NLP.
• Excellent communicator who enjoys engaging with the developer and open source community.
• Passion for open source projects and community-driven research/tooling.
• Great communication skills.
• Willing to dive into things quickly, pick up new tools from the open source community, and enjoys exploring new ideas.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity designed to recognize the value and impact of your contributions to Ideogram’s success.
• 4 weeks of vacation to recharge and explore.
• Comprehensive health, vision, and dental coverage starting on day one.
• RRSP/401(k) with employer match up to 4% to invest in your future from the moment you join.
• Top-of-the-line tools and tech to fuel your creativity and productivity.
• Toronto HQ perks: Steps from Union Station and the PATH, with daily in-office lunches and dinners.
• Autonomy to explore and experiment — whether you’re testing new ideas, running large-scale experiments, or diving into research, you’ll have access to compute/resources you need when there’s a clear business or creative use case. We encourage curiosity and bold thinking.
• A culture of learning and growth, where curiosity is encouraged and mentorship is part of the journey.