AI Lead Engineer

DFINITY is looking for an experienced Senior AI Engineer. In addition to strong engineering skills, this role requires excellent communication and leadership skills to drive the AI initiative at DFINITY. The ideal candidate enjoys solving large, ambiguous problems at the intersection of research and product design. You are eager to pursue a high-impact mission, which may fail, and have the vision to shape a new product category. 

We believe that the security guarantees of smart contracts can solve one of the most fundamental problems of AI, namely trust in the underlying models. By running training and inference on-chain, the user of an AI model can verify that they are interacting with a trustworthy model. Do you want to be part of this ambitious project and help solve this fundamental problem?  

Responsibilities:

• Define the mid- and long-term roadmap of AI on the Internet Computer.
• Identify a product-market fit for AI use cases that require an extra level of trust and “fit into” a smart contract  
• Maintain and optimize AI libraries that smart contracts can use to perform training and/or inference. For example: https://github.com/sonos/tract
• Work on the long-term goal of bringing AI hardware acceleration to smart contracts. This will require work with standards such as https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-nn and research in deterministic AI computation.
• Represent DFINITY at conferences and events.
• Help and work with the decentralized AI community of the Internet Computer.

Requirements:

• Engineering: Solid coding skills at Senior Software Engineer level, an urge to solve complex technical problems, attention to detail, numbers- and metrics-based decision making
• AI experience:  A track record of designing, training and running tailor-made AI models / ML solutions with real-world adoption.  Preferably experience with AI model transformation and deterministic AI
• Product-oriented: Demonstrated experience with eliciting customer requirements and shaping a product to meet these needs
• Communication: A versatile communicator that can adapt to different stakeholders (researchers, engineers, community). This person should be able to extract the essence of a complex topic so that it can be shared with a wide audience
• Leadership:  Experience leading projects or smaller teams and you can rally a group of people to pursue an ambitious goal.  You should have an entrepreneurial spirit with an urge to succeed and make an impact.

* Please note that this role requires in-office work from our amazing office in Zurich 3 days per week

About DFINITY and the Internet Computer:

The Internet Computer is the fastest and only infinitely scalable general-purpose blockchain — incubated and launched by the DFINITY Foundation in May 2021. A team of over 200 world-renowned cryptographers, distributed systems engineers, and programming language experts have taken on the massive technological challenge of building, maintaining, and continuously improving a ‘world computer’ powerful enough to host Web3 dApps, DeFi, games, NFTs, social media, and metaverse projects.

DFINITY was founded in 2016 by entrepreneur and crypto theoretician, Dominic Williams, and attracted interest and financial contributions from early members of the Ethereum community. Later, top-tier institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital, and SV Angel backed the Internet Computer in a collective effort to help build out Web3.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.