ML Engineer

📋 Job Overview

At Krea, we are building next-generation AI creative tools. We're dedicated to making AI intuitive and controllable for creatives - our mission is to build tools that empower human creativity, not replace it. We believe AI is a new medium that allows us to express ourselves through various formats - text, images, video, sound, and even 3D. We're building better, smarter, and more controllable tools to harness this medium. We recently took this a step forward with the launch of Krea 2, our first foundation model, built completely from scratch for aesthetic diversity and stylistic control. We've raised over $83M and are backed by world-class investors such as a16z, Bain Capital, and Abstract. We work full-time and in-person at our waterfront office in San Francisco. We care about creativity: our team includes musicians, designers, visual artists, and engineers.

🏢 About Krea

We’re looking for an ML Engineer to architect and build Krea’s personalization and recommendation systems from scratch. You’ll have full ownership over how we understand user taste, curate content, and adapt generative models to individual aesthetics. This is a role at the intersection of recommendation systems, representation learning, and generative image and video tools.

🎯 The Role

You’ll be responsible for architecting and building Krea’s personalization and recommendation stack from the ground up, owning the technical direction end to end. You’ll design algorithms to model user preference and taste, enabling Krea’s models to adapt to individual styles and aesthetics. You’ll build high-quality, curated feeds that balance exploration, personalization, and aesthetic coherence. You’ll work directly with the model and research team to co-design personalization mechanisms that influence how our generative models learn, adapt, and express style. You’ll contribute to personalized image generation research, with a focus on style, taste and subjective quality. You’ll collaborate closely with product, design, and research to define what “good personalization” means in a creative context. You’ll take systems from research and prototyping through production, iteration, and continuous improvement.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Architect and build Krea’s personalization and recommendation stack from the ground up, owning the technical direction end to end
• Design algorithms to model user preference and taste, enabling Krea’s models to adapt to individual styles and aesthetics
• Build high-quality, curated feeds that balance exploration, personalization, and aesthetic coherence
• Work directly with the model and research team to co-design personalization mechanisms that influence how our generative models learn, adapt, and express style
• Contribute to personalized image generation research, with a focus on style, taste and subjective quality
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and research to define what “good personalization” means in a creative context
• Take systems from research and prototyping through production, iteration, and continuous improvement

📌 Required Qualifications

• Strong experience building recommendation systems or personalized feeds from scratch
• Proven ability to design and ship high-quality curated content experiences
• Experience working with media-based personalization (image, video preferred; music or other modalities also welcome)
• Solid foundations in machine learning, representation learning, and modern deep learning techniques
• Strong Python skills and experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX
• Ability to operate independently, make architectural decisions, and own complex systems end to end

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience with large-scale data systems and production ML infrastructure
• Prior work on or familiarity with diffusion models or generative image systems
• Background in embeddings, similarity search, ranking, or aesthetic evaluation
• Interest in creative tools, art, design, or generative media

🎁 Benefits

• Team: Work alongside a world-class team building the future of AI creative tooling
• Impact: Significant scope and company-wide impact
• Competitive compensation: generous salary & equity packages
• Health & wellness: 100% health & 99% dental/vision insurance premiums covered for employees, health FSA accounts, & long-term disability coverage
• Time off: Flexible PTO policy
• Financial planning: 401k with a 4% company-sponsored match
• Meals in the office: breakfast, lunch, dinner - you name it, we'll cover it
• Transit: Ubers covered to & from the office
• Sponsorship: We're open to sponsoring international visas where we can (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H-1B, O-1, E-3).

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

We're open to sponsoring international visas where we can (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H-1B, O-1, E-3).