Staff Software Engineer, The Browser Company
ML Infrastructure
$225-275k
+Equity package
More information about location
Building Arc, a new web browser
Job no longer available
Building Arc, a new web browser
101-200 employees
Job no longer available
$225-275k
+Equity package
More information about location
101-200 employees
Company mission
To build a better web browser— one that enables people to build their own home on the internet, and arms them with the tools they need to be more focused, organized, and in control.
Role
Who you are
- 5+ years of experience optimizing and productionizing modern machine learning models, especially ones that run in a real-world product environment (bonus if you’ve worked closely with transformer models)
- You have production experience with a modern coding language like Python
- You have experience with fine-tuning, distilling, and improving modern machine learning infrastructure and models
- You're passionate about performance and efficiency and coming up with creative approaches to building a new kind of browser
- You have experience independently running critical projects or initiatives with minimal guidance
- You’re pragmatic, motivated by nebulous problems, and excited to work in a startup environment with quick product validation cycles
What the job involves
- As a Machine Learning Engineer at The Browser Company, you’ll be working alongside product engineers, designers, and our Co-Founder, Hursh Agrawal, to build the next LLM-powered interface for the internet
- You’ll be working to improve our on-device models so that our Members are able to get answers fast and take the busy work out of their days
- Scope and spearhead projects to fine-tune, distill, or train transformer models for various features within the browser
- Innovate our on-device model architecture in MLX, ONNX, and other frameworks and model formats
- Trial and improve new on-device models, including fine-tuning new LLMs, to be performant on a variety of machines
- Build infrastructure to collect or generate training data for building or improving models in a privacy safe way
- Create ways for us to determine and track model performance and accuracy to improve our app efficiency overtime
- After 1 month you will:
- Onboard to the team and codebase with your onboarding buddy
- Attend a number of onboarding presentations on the company, product, codebase, and culture
- Get familiar with the Swift language, the Arc codebase, and how we ship features
- Ship a few bug fixes and small improvements across our codebase and tooling
- Have pair programmed with a few people on the engineering team
- Be regularly posting product feedback about the browser in our #dogfooding channel
- After 3 months you will:
- Be familiar with how we prototype and build new features, working with product engineers to brainstorm ways to use models to add intelligence to Arc
- Be familiar with our cloud infrastructure and data pipelines
- Be familiar with how we run inference both on-device and in the cloud
- Be testing new prototypes with existing, on-device models to test performance and viability
- Participate in product brainstorms to think about the future of Arc
- Be interview trained and interviewing candidates for roles at the Browser Company
- Be contributing to on-call rotations and jumping into incidents to support the team
- Regularly attend weekly engineering discussions about our architecture, how we do code review, code style, and more
- After 6 months you will:
- Collaborate with our CTO and other ML and infrastructure engineers to shape the product roadmap
- Creatively solve problems with product engineers, using pragmatic solutions ranging from basic heuristics, regressions, ML models, to AI depending on the feature
- Own our on-device model architecture, updating it to try new models, change how we work with LoRA adapters, and optimizing it for performance and quality
- Drive projects from conception to production launch independently
- Own our infrastructure to collect training data and fine-tune models for our use-cases
- Have built out mechanisms to assess quality and performance, and be working with product teams to improve the efficacy of our models and heuristics
- Be mentoring and pair-programming with newer engineers to help them get spun up on the codebase
- Our core working hours are 11 AM-2 PM Eastern Time
Application process
- Deadline to apply: January 1, 2025 at 7:00 AM GMT
Our take
The browser is a universal piece of technology, enabling people to access all that they want from the internet. However, the browser itself is often ignored, and despite all the changes to other software over the years, it has remained relatively unchanged. The Browser Company is building a new browser named Arc; designed to think quicker, reduce user work, and facilitate the modern way in which the internet is used.
The Browser Company, founded in 2019, sees an opportunity to create a browser that excites. Currently, brand dedication for browsers is limited, as they are designed to act in the background, which keeps their performance issues in the background as well. The Browser Company aims for Arc to be intelligent, and overcome problems such as overwhelming hits, online distraction and information being hidden under irrelevant results. Its competitors of course include some of the biggest names in tech, but it hopes to stand out by creating a browser that is dramatically new and more powerful, which will create its own space in the market through uniqueness in performance.
The Browser Company’s browser was released for mobile and Windows in 2024 and has been met with positive reviews. The company has raised impressive funds that will contribute to the further development of Arc and the release of Dia - an AI-focused browser - set to be released in 2025.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Mar 2024
$50m
LATE VC
Jan 2023
$56.8m
SERIES A
Total funding: $136.8m
Company benefits
- Choose-Your-Own-Compensation Plan: When we give you a job offer, we’ll actually give you two different offers — one that is focused on having a higher salary and one focused on higher equity. Candidates can choose either offer (or any numbers in-between) when they accept.
- Best in the Biz Insurance: We provide employees with full coverage medical, vision, and dental insurance and a free One Medical membership to help you keep you and your family healthy. We cover 100% of employee plan costs and up to 90% for dependents.
- Napping During the Workday: Some of us are better in the mornings, others are more productive in the afternoon. People should take breaks when they need to. If you’re on our team, we trust you to get your work done — our policy is: work when it makes sense for you!
- Take Time Off, Please!: We believe that people do their best work when they’ve rested and had valuable time off. So rather than having a maximum number of days off, we actually have a recommended minimum vacation of 20 days a year. Take time off when you need it and also just when you feel like it.
- Extremely Flexible Parental Leave: We are proud to offer an extremely flexible 12 weeks of parental leave — for any parent regardless of gender and for birth, adoption, surrogacy, or fostering. Take the 12 weeks all at once, or split up days to slowly transition back to work — we’re accommodating to everyone’s different situations! Birth mothers also qualify for an additional 6 weeks of medical leave.
- Design Your Dream Home Office: We are a remote first company. About half of our team currently lives outside of New York and across 5 different time zones. So if you need some stuff to make working from home a bit easier, we offer a $1000 stipend for anything you need to get comfortable.
- Cozy Office in Brooklyn, Wooo!: If you do happen to live in the New York area (or you want an excuse to visit) you can come into our beautiful office in Williamsburg. Coming into office is entirely optional, some of us come almost every day and some of us come in once a week. No obligation, we just genuinely like each other!
Company values
- Show up with heartfelt intensity
- Start with "what could be?"
- Assume you don't know
- You're on the hook for the team
- Make them feel something
Company HQ
SoHo, New York, NY
Articles
Leadership
Josh Miller
(CEO)Board Member at Patreon. Co-Founder and former CEO of Branch.com. Former Director of Product for The White House.
Hursh Agrawal
(Engineering)Principal/Owner of Enso Code. Former Interim CTO of Thirty Madison and of Jumprope. Co-founder and previous CTO of Zinc.
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