Level: Junior - Mid-level
1-5 YOE in (design, data analysis, etc)
Salary Range: $100k - $180k USD
Stock Options

We're looking for a visual curator to help take the UI-AI team to the next level. Do you love exploring, cataloguing, and designing our visual world? We have a unique role for you!

At Diagram, creating high quality custom AI models relies on having a dataset that’s as diverse and interesting as it is clean and well curated (not just 10000 images of Keanu Reeves). Some of this data will be generated automatically with AI, some will be imported manually from open data sources, and some will be sourced from the internet or archives. Your job will be to use your personal taste to consistently push forward both the scale and quality of our datasets and ensure that the models we create from them will be amazing.

This is not an explicitly technical role to start, but we expect you to be open to learning how the technology (python / neural nets / figma plugins / &c) works and helping us to define how the design data should be imported, processed, and thought about. For example, we (in collaboration with AI models like CoPilot) will help you write basic python scripts to find duplicate or low quality examples and write the good stuff into our database.

We expect that some days you’ll be generating images with our latest AI models and critiquing the results. Other days you’ll be scouting libraries for the old manuscripts, digging up design manuals, and finding the best open source design files. Another day you’ll be looking at the Bézier handles of an icon and trying to figure out if it’s real or generated by an AI, then analyze the curves with python code (don’t worry, we can teach you). Another day you’ll have a brainwave about how to make emoji in the style of hello kitty—and then create that!

Probably lots of being online, learning, and growing in this role as we grow our UI-AI team from one to a highly collaborative group that works with our product team to build custom AI models that understand design at its best. Since we’re a startup, you’ll be wearing a lot of hats. We want you to grow into the directions of greatest interest to you (eg Design, Data Science, Machine Learning, or Engineering) or define the future of this role.

Your current role might be

• Librarian

• Researcher

• Data Scientist

• Designer

• Design Engineer

• Data Analyst

Responsibilities

• Curate

  • Find new sources of excellent design data

  • Find rare aesthetics online or offline

  • Spot check the quality from import → final output

  • Manually create datasets as required

  • Debug data issues upstream of UI-AI models

    • (this week, @Andrew Pouliot realized that the reason the model wasn’t learning is that half of the images were all black… this happens more than you might think)

  • Help customers (eg design orgs at companies) import data into our design data store

  • Ensure data quality in our design data store

• Communicate

  • Work with our model partners to send them high quality data

  • Work with data partners to make sure they’re sending us high quality data

  • Develop and refine guidelines to protect designers with individual styles

  • Light community management w/ open source design data

  • Collaborate w/ contractors doing data quality assurance and generation

  • Summarize feedback from users and connect to data quality issues

• Prompt-Hacking

  • Write creative prompts for models like ChatGPT & stable diffusion to generate data

  • Push the limits of our AI models to extract hidden capabilities

  • Put your creative writing to get AI to role-play as a ~totally amazing designer~

  • “prompt engineering” if you will

• Design

  • Use our Figma plugins and test generated layers (Magician, Genius, future stuff)

  • Work with Design team to create nice examples for new users

Aesthetic

• Basic Figma skills

• Deep knowledge of design: trends and classics

• Enjoys using tools like are.na, Pinterest (sorry for the cringe…), Notion, etc

Technical

Most of these are optional but a sample of what you'll be expected to learn on the job

• Excellent written and visual communication skills

• Awareness of SQL

• Basic knowledge of python

  • data processing

  • web scraping

• Basic knowledge of image formats and tradeoffs

  • eg SVG, PNG

• Ready to learn

  • Light Typescript / React

  • ML and design terminology

  • whatever comes up! we’re a startup

Bonus Points

• Expert level in Python

• AI

  • Experience creating content in DALLE, Midjourney, etc

  • Experience training or using custom ML models

• Deep design skills

  • Font design w/ Glyphs

  • experience with design systems

  • icon design

  • knowledge of Sketch, Canva, other design apps

(can accomidate people with greater technical exp.)

Application Process

• click apply, write a short email introducing yourself

• include a link to some work you’ve done in design, eg something you’ve curated, a portfolio, etc and your CV

• intro chat with our team

• your paid take-home project will focus on your curation skills, eg

  • curate a dataset of images and text descriptions of emoji

  • create a log of designing a screen from beginning to end, documenting your thought process at each step