Staff Developer Advocate - AI & Machine Learning

Lightningai in Palo Alto, California, United States

$121,000 - $213,000

Who we are

Lightning AI is the company reimagining the way AI is built. After creating and releasing PyTorch Lightning in 2019, Lightning AI was launched to reshape the development of artificial intelligence products for commercial and academic use.

Focusing on simplicity, sustainability, modularity, and extensibility, Lightning AI streamlines the lifecycle of machine learning development to expand widespread AI adoption. Its aim is to enable individual and enterprise users to build deployment-ready AI tools without having to hire experts or sink resources into in-house infrastructure.

Lightning AI is a remote-first company backed by $58.6 million in funding from Coatue, Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Firstminute.

What’s important to us

We are building a company of people that care deeply about the impact of AI on our society. We value:

  • Integrity: AI is bound to change how we interact with computers, with each other, and the world—for the better. We are committed to building an inclusive company and developing ethical AI that improves humanity.
  • Perseverance: Be bold, take the initiative, and make decisions with confidence. We empower our community, clients, and colleagues to tackle the impossible.
  • Curiosity: We are genuinely interested in finding solutions to advance the state of AI research and foster its application in novel products. It's not about whether we can solve the problem, but how.
We also feel that it’s essential to point out the self-evident here – there’s a genuine lack of diversity in our industry, which has to change. One of our goals is to help drive that change. Lightning AI is fully committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all of its practices, especially when it comes to growing our team. Our culture promotes inclusion, and we embrace how rewarding it is to work with people from all walks of life.

What We're Looking For

As more developers use Grid and Lightning, we are actively investing in our user communities. This is an opportunity for you to shape the developer experience in the AI space while driving the adoption and utilization of technology that will transform the machine learning ecosystem as a whole. At Grid.ai , developer advocacy centers around 3 tenants:

  1. Community: Our goal is to amplify the community's voice within the company by increasing engagement, gathering feedback, and working together.
  2. Content: From writing blog posts, drafting articles, and producing videos to building demos and developing our documentation, we want to ensure that our users have the resources they need to get started and learn about the latest ways to use Grid and Lightning!
  3. Engineering: At the end of the day, we are all engineers. We connect with developers in the field, foster strong relationships with internal teams, and work together on prioritizing feedback to inform discovery and roadmap development.

What You’ll Do

  • Amplify the Lightning and Grid Community by connecting with users in the community Slack, speaking at meetups and conferences, and hosting Community Office Hours and Technical Community Sprints.
  • Launch the first Grid and Lightning Ambassadors Program to foster community and create champions for our products.
  • Write technical content and documentation, including open source repos, blog posts, case studies, and documentation to enable engineers, scientists, and researchers to do more with Grid and Lightning.
  • Collaborate with the product and engineering teams to share the voice of the community and improve the developer experience as a whole.
  • Actively build demos on top of lightning using PyTorch, Lightning, and Grid.
  • Represent the company at conferences and meetups virtually (and across the globe when it's safe) to connect with our community, meet our users, and host fun, engaging events.

How we evaluate your candidacy

Our interviews will not only give us insight into your skillset but give you insight into our company.

  • Recruiter Interview - 15 minutes: You will speak with our recruiter about your background and what you are looking for in your next role. We want to know why you are interested in joining us and what questions you have about the team.
  • Hiring Manager Interview 45 minutes : You will chat with our VP of Marketing about your genuine passion for AI and machine learning, as well as your unique approach to the Advocacy Role. You will share your thoughts on connecting with end-users, gathering feedback, and creating champions within our community.
  • Virtual Onsite - 3 hours: You'll have the opportunity to meet with our Lead AI Educator, as well as a product manager, marketing specialist, and software engineer for 30-45 minutes each and work through exercises spanning community building, technical content creation, culture, and NLP, Computer Vision, or Audio Processing Tasks. You will also meet our CEO, William Falcon, to chat about your background, what you’ve learned, and why you’d like to work with us.
  • Offer: We determine your level based on your interview performance and make an offer based on geo-located salary bands updated on a monthly basis using Carta's Total Compensation tool. During the presentation call, we will review the base salary, benefits, number of options, notional option value, and strike price. We would like to know if you accept our offer within 7 days.
    • As of 4/11/22, if we hire you in New York City, your base salary would fall within the bands below. Please keep in mind that the equity portion of your offer is not included in these numbers and represents a significant part of your total compensation.
      • Senior Developer Advocate 2, IC5: $121,000 - $181,000 base
      • Staff Developer Advocate, IC6: $131,000 - $197,000 base
      • Senior Staff Developer Advocate, IC7: $142,000 - $213,000 base

When you'll hear from us

We aim to review every application within 72 hours of submission and provide feedback on each of your interviews within 48 hours of completion. If you don't hear from us, please reach out to your recruiter or careers@lightning.ai directly to get an update on your candidacy.

How you’ll be rewarded

We champion equal pay for work of equal or comparable value based on the level of skill, effort, responsibility, and impact of any given role. We use Carta's Total Compensation tool to enable data-driven decision-making around benchmarks, levels, and planning. We are confident that our compensation practices are equitable, explainable, fair, and competitive, and in the spirit of transparency, we provide a compensation bands for each open role.

We pride ourselves on making sure our employees enjoy a good quality of life, no matter where they live. We offer competitive base salaries and stock options with a 25% one year cliff and monthly vesting thereafter. For our international employees, we work with Velocity Global to pay you in your local currency and provide equitable benefits across the globe.

In the US, we offer:

  • 90% monthly premium contributions towards medical, dental, and vision plans for you, you and your spouse, you and your children, or you and your family, along with HSA and FSA options. Our health plans are offered through Aetna, a health insurance company with a care network encompassing 1.3 million doctors and 5,700 hospitals across America.
  • Life and AD&D insurance equal to 1x salary, as well as optional supplemental life insurance for extra peace of mind
  • Flexible paid time off plus 3 weeks of company-wide mandatory vacation in May, August, and December. Most of our employees take a total of 25-30 days off per year.
  • 12 weeks of paid family leave for employees who have worked with the company for 6-12 months and 16 weeks of paid family leave for employees who have worked with the company for 12+ months
  • $500 monthly meal reimbursement, including groceries & food delivery services
  • $1,000 1-time home office build out for a desk, chair, keyboard, pair of headphones, and/or other home office supplies
  • $1,000 annual learning & development stipend for classes, conferences, certifications, and continuing education
  • 100% covered bike membership
  • $45/month to ClassPass, a platform providing access to over 30,000 gyms and studios, as well as 5,000 beauty and spa partners, in 28 countries
  • Access to monthly equity education sessions hosted by Carta and 1:1 meetings with Certified Public Accountants so that you can take proactive measures to minimize taxes due and maximize the value of your equity
  • Ability to early exercise your stock options after 1 year of continuous employment
  • Opportunities to obtain an employment-based immigrant VISA for relocation every 3 years
  • Membership to a local co-working space upon request
  • 24/7 access to:
    • Teladoc, the leader in whole-person virtual care with access to doctors, therapists, and medical experts anywhere you are by phone or video
    • One Medical, a patient-focused on-demand primary care practice
    • Kindbody, a fertility, gynecology, and wellness service provider
    • HealthAdvocate, an employee assistance program (EAP)
    • Talkspace, a comprehensive, personalized mental healthcare platform providing access to licensed therapists for therapy, medication, assessment, healthy living support, and self-help tools
    • Headspace, a guided meditation application focused on improving mindfulness, sleep, and stress-relief
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