ML Open Source Lead
About Ideogram Ideogram’s mission is to make world-class design accessible to everyone, multiplying human creativity. We build proprietary generative media models and AI native creative workflows, tackling unsolved challenges in graphic design.
Our team includes builders with a track record of technology breakthroughs including early research in Diffusion Models, Google’s Imagen, and Imagen Video. We care about design, taste, and craft as much as research and engineering – shipping experiences that creatives actually love.
We’ve raised nearly $100M, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. Headquartered in Toronto with a growing team in NYC, we're scaling fast, aiming to triple over the next year. We're a flat team with a culture of high ownership, collaboration, and mentorship.
Explore Ideogram 4.0 , Enterprise , API , Open Source , Character and Custom Models blog posts, and try Ideogram at ideogram.ai . About The Role 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
Responsibilities
- 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
- 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
What We’re Looking For
- Advanced degree or equivalent research experience in Machine Learning or Deep Learning
- 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
- 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
- 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
- enjoys exploring new ideas Our Culture We’re a team of exceptionally talented, curious builders who love solving tough problems and turning bold ideas into reality.
- We move fast, collaborate deeply, and operate without unnecessary hierarchy, because we believe the best ideas can come from anyone.
- Everyone at Ideogram rolls up their sleeves to make our products and our customers successful.
- We thrive on curiosity, creativity, and shared ownership.
- We believe that small, dedicated teams working together with trust and purpose can move faster, think bigger, and create amazing things.
- Ideogram is committed to welcoming everyone — regardless of gender identity, orientation, or expression.
- Our mission is to create belonging and remove barriers so everyone can create boldly.
- What We Offer 💸 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
- 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
- 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.